To make things easier, we put the daily activities into four steps: Analysis, Activity, Management and Exploration

Analysis – Research the effectiveness of your Twitter activities to make future decisions.

• Check the data gathered by link shorteners to see which links/tweets perform the best
• Examine dashboard analytic data for feedback
• Keep records of tweets getting the most response, via retweets, comments or other responses

Activity – Taking action within Twitter and making tweets

• Schedule tweets using your management software or publish them yourself
• Check Direct Messages and @ mentions and respond
• Find valuable content from others and retweet it

Management – Organize the incoming and outgoing information, making it as easy as possible to find and handle everything you need.

• Organize users into lists to keep up with specific groups at once
• Set up your social media management software to filter your information into a more manageable format
• Make sure your also budget your time efficiently, give each task an appropriate amount of time, whatever that may be. Also consider making a daily timetable to remind yourself how you want to spend your time.

Exploration – Find new information that you want to share or investigate further.

• Follow relevant blogs or information sources for current and breaking information to use
• Use search engines to find more information about the most relevant keywords to your topic
• Explore what brands, corporations, topically relevant celebrities and even competitors are saying
• Follow any sources you find in the future to build a good information base for yourself

Follow this workflow setup and you will have a clear idea of what you should be doing and why. Also important is when you do each task. Do you like to explore at the end of the day and compile new material for the next morning, or are you just the opposite? Does checking your direct messages give you new ideas for things to research or help you analyze your most popular topics? Set up your own workflow and timetable chart the way that works best for you.

Do you have any tips or comments on how you like to organize yourself on twitter? Please let me know with your comments!

Frustrated User

When was the last time you thought about your site beyond adding content? It is probably time to take a look at how things are organized. When you started the site you had certain goals, ideas and experiences, now as time has passed it is a good idea to take another look at those goals and see what’s new. Below are 3 website SEO tips that everyone running a website needs to analyze frequently, especially with changing times and trends.

How to Structure a Website

Take a look at your homepage and ask yourself a few questions from the perspective of a new user. Is it easy for you to access different pages and find the information, products or services that you are looking for? What is the formatting like, is it search engine and user friendly? Does the site deliver the right message and target the key points you are looking to communicate to readers? These three basic points will help to determine how effectively the website is structured and are good questions to ask to find ways to improve. Let’s take a closer look at each in turn.

The first thing to look at is website format. You will want to be appealing to people, and have a aesthetically pleasing layout, but also consider being search engine friendly. Do you have the right words in the right places? Too many images, videos or animation with nothing for a search engine to grab on to? Consider having an SEO company take a look at things if you are not sure what you can improve on.

Ease of navigation can be a big stumbling point for users. It must be easy to find what you are looking for quickly, and if your internal navigation is subpar things can get tricky. Put popular pages in an easy to find spot with good labeling. Consider having broad topics on the home page and then being more targeted internally. The goal is to get people clicking through and avoid creating a high bounce rate.

Making sure you have a clear message will let people know they have come to the right place and encourage them to stay within your site to find what they have come looking for. Along with having a clear message, include key points of your site. Key posts, special deals or discounts and current information should be readily available immediately. If these three aspects are combined, you will find that you have a much more effective site, increasing traffic, lowering bounce rates and generating more sales.

Pick the Right Keywords

One thing that is constant in life is that things will always change. If you haven’t taken time recently to go over the keywords on your website, now is the time. Trends in your niche, new sites targeting the same keywords and changes in search patterns can all disrupt your keyword targeting aspirations. Staying current is imperative; ranking #1 in Google for a keyword that gets no searches is not going to bring in much traffic. Frequent research and development on this front will help you stay ahead of the game. Plus this kind of research could give you deeper insights into your niche. Check this out for more information on how to choose keywords.

Taking Charge of your Purpose

If visitors to your site are ever saying to themselves, “Umm, so what do I do?” something is wrong. A website should have a strong purpose and it should be obvious what that purpose is when someone arrives at your site. No one will be asking what to do because you will be telling them up front, this is what you’re here to see and this is how you do it. Whether it’s signing up to a newsletter, finding a link to buy your product or asking a question on the forum you can help guide people to where they want to be. If you can answer the questions, “What is the purpose of this page and what am I going to get from it?” then you are on the right track.

It’s important to stay active in running a website. Content is important but there is certainly more to it than that if you want to be successful. For more information right from the source, check out the Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.

Happy User!

Have some more SEO tips? Personal strategies that you used? Let us know what you think in the comments!

The first stop on the journey of how to choose keywords will be The Google AdWords Keyword Tool which will provide you with the data from those millions of searchs we were talking about. The first thing you will see that we now need some keywords and phrases to query.

Picking Your Keywords

Although there is no exact science to keyword research there are some tips that you can keep in mind while brainstorming. First of all, try to think like someone who knows that they are looking for your product and input those results, then move down the spectrum. Think like someone who might have a looser idea of what they want, or not know the name of the product. If the first example person is searching for “hammer”, the second person might search for “nail installer”, another person may search for “how to connect wood together”. This may seem far out, but in the keyword analysis stage more is much better, as you might come across a search term that is a little off kilter that no one is yet targeting. A great feature of the Google Keyword Tool is that it provides you with a list of search terms that it thinks are similar to the keywords you’ve specified. This can be another great way to expand your thinking when picking your keywords. In addition to the Google Keyword Tools similar search terms list, you can use the Keyword-Finder.net keyword finder which will take one initial keyword which you provide and reward you with a number of related keyword ideas which you can use with the Google Keyword Tool!

Narrowing Down the List

Now that you’ve compiled a list of keywords and plugged them into the Keyword Tool it’s time to analyze the results and pick the ones to target. There are some things that you will have to look at and decide for yourself which route you want to take. Some keywords will receive millions of searches, some others thousands and some hundreds or even none. Very broad or basic keywords probably get millions of hits and will probably be very lucrative and target by a lot of companies, probably some with large advertising budgets and teams of people working to get to the top. If that scene is for you then by all means go for the big fish term and attempt to get to the top rank, however that may not be a viable option for everyone. A great way to go is to look for on topic, longer keywords that are getting moderate amounts of searches and go after those. Do some Google searches for these keywords and see what comes up on the first page, is it strong websites with relevant information that are already providing a good service to people making those searches or shoddy turnkey sites or other off topic sites? Look at what you find when making a decision on what to do with each keyword. Remember, “long tail” keywords comprise the majority of the searches on the internet and so provide a way for you to get a foothold in your market with some careful research.

Keyword Testing

So you’ve done your research and now it’s time to test what you’ve picked. If you have time to wait and see how things go you can just go ahead and optimize your site for your chosen keywords and wait a few months to see how things play out organically. On the other hand, if you are looking for results a bit faster, consider running an AdWords campaign for your keyword for a short period (long enough to get some realistic data though, anywhere from days to a few weeks depending on the traffic they keyword is getting). With the test data on your keyword you will have a lot of new data. You’ll see updated impressions showing you the most current search data, how many visitors you received from your keyword and also how many of them convert to sales, if that happens to be your thing. You can take that data and run with it. Maybe you’ll find that most of your searches are done on the weekend and that people coming from a specific keyword are converting better than another. Any data you get from this will help you, even if the keywords you’ve chosen aren’t working you’ll have a better idea of what to look for in the future.

Keywords are always evolving and many search terms will fluctuate in volume over time. It’s important to stay up to date and always look at what keywords you are targeting. If you make a lot of posts, make sure you are taking the time to do some research on what to cover and if you have a mostly static website make sure that it is optimized and your keywords are still relevant to your brand. Remember, choosing good keywords can propel you forward while choosing irrelevant ones will leave you in the dust, so always do your research BEFORE you start your project.

Do you have experience choosing keywords? More questions on what to do or look for? Write a comment and let me know!

Have a look at what steps you’ve taken and question whether they are helping or hindering you. Take a look at these items that might be damaging your chances at success or preventing you from achieving your social media goals…

1. You’re Being Too Self Centered

Here is the secret about people. Everyone is pretty worried about themselves and if you want to reach someone you need to be worried about them too. People are only interested in you insofar as they are concerned about how you can help them. Think in terms of how you can provide value to these people. The easiest way to do this is to just worry about how you can help someone else, not talking about yourself and what you are going to get out of it.

2. You Aren’t Visible

You can write what you know and what you love all day. This might give people an idea of who you are and what you think but it probably leaves a lot to the imagination as well. If you take some time to get out and interact with people, via responding to comments, making comments on other blogs and through social media sites, you will make yourself much more visible to others.

Doing this gives you credibility too, when people see you around and providing interesting commentary they will be more likely to check you out. Try to stay within your niche as well, because that’s where your target audience is going to be.

3. You Are Too Serious

There is such a thing as thinking about something too much. If you are going around reading articles about how to be the best you can be, and that’s a noble goal, make sure to take a step back and evaluate what you’ve been told. Maybe certain things aren’t for you, or you could come up with something new that really works.

Test things out and make mistakes if you have to. Just because you haven’t heard it from a social media guru doesn’t mean it can never work. Leave some room for being spontaneous in with all your planning.

4. You Are An Island

It might sound counterintuitive, but promoting other peoples posts can be beneficial for you. If someone in your niche has made a great post, share it. If there is a cool new product that is related to yours, let your followers know.

People will appreciate the value that you bring and you will grow your reputation. Maybe next time when you come up with something great people will be more receptive, knowing that you are someone who shares good content, regardless of the source.

5. You Are On The Wrong Network

Not being on the right networks can prove to be a real problem, but with a bit of research you can find the right spot for your audience. You (hopefully) know who your target market is, so all you need to do is identify where they congregate on the internet.

For example, if you are in the graphic design industry a place like deviantArt would be an amazing place for you to begin networking. On the other hand if you are in the vacuum cleaner business, deviantArt would not be for you. Get out of networks where your target audience isn’t and concentrate your time where you can reach more people.

6. No One Is Sharing Your Content

Its a good idea to check that you’ve provided easy ways for people to share your content. Tools like TweetButton or StumbleUpon buttons are simple to add and make it so much easier for people to share your stuff with others. The easier you make it to share, the more likely people are to do it. It doesn’t hurt to have a button or two built in as a reminder, as long as it isn’t gaudy.

7. Your Site Isn’t Captivating

Maybe you’ve done a good job with your social media outreach. People followed you and see your messages regularly, but traffic has remained pretty constant and hasn’t gone up, or sales are still holding at the same rates. You might need to take a look at your whole operation, website included.

Take a look and consider things that could use improvement. Run some tests with friends/family/person you met off the street five minutes ago. Ask them to have a look at your site and offer feedback for improvements, set up a poll, get the information and make some positive changes. For some more help check out some tips from Copyblogger.

8. You’re a Seller

Don’t sell anything to anyone. If someone thinks they are being pitched to they will turn off and put up guards so you have no chance of getting in. Instead just provide useful services that people WANT and then let them decide on their own what they need.

If you have the patience to let people come to you and you are there providing value to them in some form, be it great content or useful products and services; not only will they be more receptive, but they’ll remember you as the person who helped them out instead of the pushy salesperson!

9. You’re Getting Discouraged and Want to Give Up

Like many great undertakings, social media promotion doesn’t yield results overnight. Have faith in your product and keep getting the word out. If you are persistant you will be discovered by people and if they like what they see they’ll bring other people in on it. Don’t let a slow start get you down, keep your social presence high and wait for good things to come your way.

10. You’re not Having Fun

Take a moment to think right now. Social media, hmm, so I’m spending time on sites like Facebook for work. That’s something most people would have to reserve for leisure time! Now consider that as well. If many people are using social media for fun how can you reach them. You need something interesting and fun to grab their interest away from looking at pictures of puppies or hearing about what someone did on the weekend, even if its for a few minutes.

Write something out of the ordinary that’s just for fun, see how it plays out. Find other interesting people in your niche and follow them, interact with the community and have some fun! If you’re enjoying what you’re doing that’s going to show and people are going to gravitate towards you all the more.

What is your top reason for getting down on yourself about social media? Did you ever want to quit? Did you make a change and see great results? Write a comment and let us know!

Most of the time tweets just pass through the world, generally ignored, floating on into oblivion. With over 200 million tweets a day it’s easy to get flooded and have your tweets sink out of sight. It’s even easier to fall into bad habits like self-promoting too much without engaging or talking to others, appearing like you’re just there to sell, sell, sell. Spend some time following one and you will find that nothing is more boring than a spammer, which is what you can quickly turn into if what you post isn’t interesting.

When you’ve only got 140 characters to work with it becomes easy to boil down what matters. It’s not proper paragraph structure or worrying about run on sentences here, in fact WHAT you say doesn’t matter as much as HOW you say it. So we worry about the most basic things we can worry about, getting people interested enough to read what’s in your links or just stop and think about what you’ve said for a few seconds. Let’s call that The Readification Factor. Second thing we’re going to worry about is how likely people are to retweet what you’re saying, because let’s face it; you don’t have 100 million twitter followers, so you could use the publicity here. We’ll call that one The Will-They-Retweet-It Factor.

Make sure not to focus on one over the other, as you’re going to need both to make your $40 million dollar tweet a reality. So now let’s go through the steps that are going to lead you to engineer this awe inspiring, powerful bit of awesomeness.

1. Know Your Audience

This should be easy to do. You know your business and you know who you are targeting. First of all do a double take and make sure that the people you are targeting and the people who are following you are one and the same. Now as you write your tweet keep those people in mind, write to their likes and in the language they associate with. For example, the followers of your denture cream review blog might not get the hilarious reference to the latest epic internet memes. Take the time to write for your audience, don’t just spit something out and assume that everyone will just “get it”.

2. Don’t Become a Spammy-McSpammer-with-Nothing-to-Say

Have you ever followed someone on twitter who posted way too much? They spam your feed with meaningless tweets and links. They use hashtags and @ mentions until you see them in your dreams. That is annoying, and it is a quick way to get you removed by a lot of followers. Now look at your feed. Who are you drawn to? Who is memorable? Think about why.

People with interesting and useful things to say are remembered and people will add them to lists so they can keep up with what is happening with those people. Most people follow a new person and have a period of time where they form an opinion of them based on how they act. Sharing value when it’s appropriate, having good insight and generally being a good source of entertainment or information will build up to the point where we associate that person with excellence. Oh, and make sure you have a distinct profile picture too. People are going to remember you by your name and your picture.

So now that you’ve built a good reputation, keep it up and you will continue to grow a following of people who actually want to hear what you have to say. So don’t mess it up, keep all your tweets to a high standard. Excellent!

SPAM!

3. People Only Read the Headline

Look around a bit next time you’re out and about and find a newspaper. Yes, I’m sure they still make those. Newspapers are in the business of headlines. They’re big, they’re flashy and they draw you in to all the tiny words below. Now consider twitter. 140 characters. That doesn’t leave a lot of room to talk about just why your link is so great and everyone should read it. You’ve got to “WOW!” them with the headline, so let’s think about that now.

You want to draw people in like with the newspaper, so you’re going to need to make that headline sound interesting enough that people are going to want to buy your “newspaper” based on that alone. If you saw a headline that said, “Hey buy this paper because its really good and I want to make lots of money off of you”, would that be incentive for you to take action? Yes, maybe if that action was to walk on past with a look of revulsion across your face. People aren’t on twitter looking to be sold to, so let’s not do that. Oh and let’s be clear about what we’re promoting here. It’s not the link that you want to sell; it’s what’s in the link, the content, which matters, so make sure that’s what you’re promoting.

4. Learn to Spell… and Punctuate!!!!

This may be the most important tip you can get for posting anything on the internet, anywhere. Poor spelling, grammar and punctuation are the three fastest ways to get dismissed, flamed or hated on the internet. Even if you’re making good points and adding value many people will ignore that and focus on the spelling or grammar. This rule covers everything you might write anywhere, not just on twitter or even the internet. Here are some quick tips to avoid this misfortune.

Use commas and periods. Use exclamation points if necessary, not all the time. Question marks go after questions, you know?

DON’T SHOUT! Capitals go at the start of a sentence and in proper nouns. Unless you really are shouting don’t use all caps.

Do not invent some weird form of text talk or copy someone else’s. Have you ever read a book? Pretend you are writing in a book. You would not see someone write a book with every other letter capitalized, weird short forms of words or extra letters added for no reason. Don’t do it, it is not cool, it is not hip, it is simply bad.

Hyphenate correctly, some words or thoughts need hyphens. Remember your apostrophes. Also, forget your apostrophes if they’re going in the wrong place. Please know your they’re, their, there. Pleeeeeeeease.

Take some time to proof-read your tweets. Don’t tell me it takes too long; we both know how long it is, it can’t take you too much time. Heck, go ahead and run it through a spellchecker if you need to; it can only help you.

Now, if you’re an accomplished linguist and writer then this is second nature and should be easy, though if punctuation and grammar aren’t your forte, take the extra time to learn and research. It will get easier and the payout will be grand indeed.

5. Give People Room for Add-ons in Their Retweets

Leave a little room for retweeters to give you a boost when they pass on your message. “Wow, so insightful thanks!”, or “This just changed my life!” are going to add a lot of credibility to your post when they show up in the streams of people who might not have ever heard of you. Seeing positive remarks from friends or other people they trust will get people clicking and following you.

Leaving those 25-30 characters for someone to add their own message to yours will encourage them to share and also leave your message intact; with all the work you’ve put into writing it you don’t want someone junking your words and filling it in with something poorly written and then having that reflect back on you as a retweet.

On the other hand if you’ve come up with something really superb that doesn’t fit within the limits then go for it. Not everything you write will come out the perfect length to fit this mould and you shouldn’t sacrifice an amazing tweet to make it fit.

Conclusion

You might look at this list and all these rules and think about how twitter is about connecting with people, sharing and having fun. That’s true and you want to do that, but you can do all that while writing excellent, well formed tweets at the same time.

The combination of these two will set you on the path towards excellence. Once you see the impact that comes from having well written headlines and sharing valuable, grammatically sound, well written and properly punctuated content you’ll wonder how you ever settled for anything less than well engineered perfection.

Who are you favorite people to follow on twitter? What do they do that you like? Have you ever followed someone that you found was annoying and ended up unfollowing them? Let me know in the comments.

Start Working Early

Starting on your work when you have a whole day ahead of you can be a huge psychological boost. You may find that you are less stressed when you give yourself lots of time to get your work done and have a brighter outlook on the day. Whereas starting later can leave you feeling out of time and behind on your work, leaving you frazzled.

Regardless of when you wake up and where you work, getting an early start will be helpful. If you work from an office you won’t have to worry about being late or traffic on the way in, and the pace is likely to be more relaxed where things could pick up later and get hectic. If you work at home, get up before the rest of the household and start the day with some uninterrupted work and time to yourself. For those people who live alone starting early will still give you an extra boost of productivity. Later on you will be able to wrap things up feeling good and without scrambling to finish your projects.

Manage Your To-Do List

Having a to-do list can definately help keep you organized, but when it grows from a cute little list of three or four items into a monster with 20+ things to grab your attention problems can arise. Try to keep focused on just a few tasks at once and organize your to-do list accordingly. You can seperate it into immediate and long term tasks and then further with major and minor ones. If your list starts to balloon don’t panic, just stay focused on completing the most important immediate tasks and then you can worry about moving on to a few more.

Manage Your Time

Now that your to-do list is under control you know what to do, but now the challenge is when to do it. Managing your time effectively is just as important as knowing what you need to do. Some times doing a few things at once works out

Your time can easily get out of hand

and is just necessary, but consider setting aside some time to give your attention to a single task for a while. Using blocks of time like this to work on your most important and immediate tasks can help you power through what needs to be done with great focus and speed. If waking up early leaves you behind still, time management like this can still get those important tasks completed on time.

Lay Out Your Plans for Specific Tasks

Organization is key. Knowing the steps you want to take before you even start a project will save you time and headaches down the line. Whether you write down the steps you plan to take for a large project or give a little bit of forethought to something smaller, effectively managing your projects is a prime example of how planning leads to success.

Don’t Get Distracted

Distractions are the bane of productivity, because they are by definition things that divide your attention, preventing you from focusing on your task. Working at a computer all day distractions are close at hand with just a few clicks. Games, recreational social media activities or interesting articles can all pull at your focus very easily if you let them. Especially when you’re using things like Twitter or Facebook for work you should be careful not to get sucked in. A good idea if you can is to set aside time for these possibly distracting activities, check your Twitter once each hour or twice a day depending on what your requirements are and then leave it alone otherwise.

Don’t Take on Too Much at Once

It is unlikely that at any given time you will have only one project on the go, and that is certainly a good thing, but make sure you don’t take on more than you can handle. Taking on fewer tasks and focusing more attention on them will enable you to work more effectively and efficiently. This will lead to projects being completed more quickly and maybe even with better results than if you had too much on your plate. You should still be able to keep working on the same volume of projects overall just completing individual jobs faster and then moving to the next. If you find your days are stressful and chaotic and productivity is suffering, take a look at how much you’ve taken on all at once and see how cutting back a little bit works for you.

Pomodoro!

Taking breaks can be just as important as working diligently. If you’re in the zone and flying through things keep it

POMODORO!!

up, but when your attention starts to wane or you hit a block try getting up and taking a short break. The Pomodoro System of taking breaks, named after a kitchen timer shaped like a tomato (Pomodoro is Italian for tomato) , revolves around 25 minute work periods with 5 minute breaks in between them, followed by a longer break every 4 pomodoros. Taking time to get refreshed will let you get back to work with unparalleled zeal!

Avoid Clutter

Keep your workspace organized. Go through everything in and on your desk and decide if it has a place in your working area. If you work at home make sure you have an office space that you keep organized where you can go to do your work, seperate from the rest of your life if at all possible. Some things that you might not think about uncluttering are your computers desktop, bookmarks and email account, but these things can have a big effect on how you work, how you feel and give you that feeling of being more organized.

Have a Stopping Point

Having an end in sight can be very motivating when it comes to getting work done. When a task seems like it will just go on forever its very disheartening and can lead you to look for things to distract you. Keeping the end on the horizon helps keep you movitaved and on task but will keep you from working too long which can be unhealthy. If your schedule changes from day to day don’t worry about keeping your end time the same every day, just set aside enough time that you can comfortably complete what you need to do and plan your stopping point around that.

With a priority on work during work time and keeping a balance between intense focus and short breaks you will find that your efficiency rises dramatically and projects move much more smoothly. So enjoy your new found time and relax when you can.

About The Author:

George McConnell is the head writer for Traffikd.com and really likes social media! He is a full time internet entrepreneur and currently writing “That Social Media Book”, focusing on the history and effects of social media on internet and real world culture since its inception.

The Benefits of A DIY SEO Campaign

When it comes to a DIY SEO campaign, there are many different benefits doing it yourself rather than hiring someone else to do it. One of the main issues that website owners and business owners may face when they are trying to make a successful SEO campaign for their website is the process of hiring someone they can trust. Here are a few benefits to doing your own SEO campaign:

• You know who’s in charge
• You don’t have to hire anyone
• You save money
• You can do it exactly the way you want it done

SEO: The Purpose and the Strategy

There are many purposes when it comes to crafting quality content that is SEO. The main purpose is that content should be optimized appropriately so that it can help to drive in a larger audience to your blog or business. This way your website can reach its maximum exposure to web surfers by attracting more search engine spiders.

If you need to start your business up through SEO, you may find that hiring a professional SEO consultant or copywriter is too expensive or too complicated. If this is the case, then you may want to take the proper steps in order to make a DIY SEO campaign that is successful.

The following steps can help you create a successful DIY SEO campaign:

1. Perform the proper keyword research: You will need to be able to search for online tools and programs that can help you to identify the search volume of a specific word or keyword. There are many free online SEO tools out there that provide this information. Google Keywords is a popular keyword tool that does not charge people to use it. For more detailed info, check out our article How to Choose Keywords.
   Note: A keyword with particularly high volumes of searches will be more challenging to use to rank your webpage.

2. Use tags: You can use H1 tags in order to contain the most desired word or keyword. H2 and h3 tags are available for additional keywords that are also important. Make sure to correctly utilize tags. If you get long tailed traffic from other sites, make sure that the websites you are getting your traffic from are relevant in regards to your niche of the type of company or business you are trying to promote.
3. Make sure to use keyword emphasis: One very easy but effective technique is use italics and bold for emphasizing a specific keyword. Some online marketers may think that this is not useful. However, emphasizing a keyword is a way of letting search engines assume automatically that there is a keyword within the content, and this in turn serves as an effective opportunity to tell search engines, like Google, exactly what your keywords are.
4. Perform external and internal link building: It is important to link other relevant pages or sources to your site. Doing this can help to greatly benefit the visitors on your site and will more likely help to increase the amount of time they will spend visiting and searching on your site.
   Note: Due to recent changes in search engine algorithms, it is important to mix up the variety of links pointing to your site. Use a balance of “brand” links (where the keywords  is your brand name), “keyword targeted” links, and non-targeted links (things like “click here”).
5. Get image links: Image links can help contribute to the diversity of your link network and provide significant SEO value. A great way to get a lot of image links is to submit your website to CSS Galleries. These galleries can also help get your website traffic and exposure in addition to their SEO value. TheCSSGalleryList.com has a paid service where they will submit your website to 100+ CSS Galleries for $20, this can save you considerable time. Don’t worry, they do it all manually by hand.

Addition DIY SEO Tips

• Use Title Tags: Title tags are important because they help to tell search engines what to display in their search results in regards to your webpage. This can significantly impact how many people will click on your webpage from a search engine’s results page.
• Use Guest Blogging: Guest blogging can also be an effective SEO strategy. Not only will your site be able to benefit in credit to the added content, but it can help to provide you with opportunities regarding backlinks.

While there are many benefits that can come from a successful DIY SEO campaign aside from saving money. The biggest benefit that bloggers, website owners, and business owners will see is an increase in web traffic, and who wouldn’t want that?

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Author bio: Edwin is an avid marketer and writer currently working at web design and Internet marketing Toronto firm 9th sphere. Edwin has a passion for great design and helping businesses succeed.

When you’re starting your brand, first work within your niche. Build your brand with the people who are most engaged in your topic and who you will be influencing and have the most influence over what you write and how your brand grows. If people know who you are and what you are about, whether they like you or not they will still be thinking about you and as long as they form an opinion of you one way or another that’s going to grow the brand. Once you’re established as someone to watch for in your niche you will start to draw in even those people you are not targeting. W hen you’re established like this you’ll have a lot of things going for you.

Branding will make you better, stronger, faster and make you drop 10 lbs instantly. It might not happen exactly like that but other people are going to think it and that will make it so in their minds. Whatever you are saying or doing will become more reputable, if you’re doing a good job people will hear about you and your brand will grow and soon you’ll be doing a great job, even if you’re still doing the same things you have been doing before. Once people have heard of you and formed a positive opinion they will be much, much more likely to seek you out and ask for you to help them rather than someone they’ve never heard of or don’t really know much about. Don’t be just another brick in the wall, stick out and be someone unique.

Being visible is a huge part of having your own brand as well. Someone looking for information skips right past the blah of random, non branded pages out there because they haven’t been given a reason to check it out. On the other hand if you look the part readers will have a stronger initial attraction to you bringing them in to see and learn about your brand and getting the ball rolling your way, picking up speed as they see all the other reasons to utilize your brand for their purposes.

Make sure they remember you. Once they’ve heard of you, you have got your foot in the door, don’t fade into the background. Be memorable and have something that pops and catches the attention of your reader. Whether its a great name, an awesome looking logo/avatar or something that you do really well or will cause you to stand out. Need an example, just think about your favourite brand, they likely have all three, name, logo and something else that sticks out when you think of them. These three things need to be consistent in all areas whether it be advertising, printed materials or promotional products found here. When readers see or think about that they will be thinking about you and what you offer. Make sure they know what that is, what service are you offering; an opinion, some helpful information, design skills; whatever it is becomes part of your brand and another part of what you offer.

Trust in business is huge. Even in the internet age, people still fly around the world to meet clients and make them feel more comfortable by building trust. A brand will help you in this area too. Once you’ve got a reputation for following your word and being trustworthy you can carry that with you and keep building it. This builds reader loyalty, increases referrals and strengthens relationships between you and your member base leading to growth and prosperity for all.

Prosperity to you!

Take some time to think about your brand. Have you already started building it, spreading the word about yourself and what you’re doing? How? What else can be done?

Use Social Media Sites to Your Advantage

Why should you use social media sites? Firing off a Google search on a topic will probably get you millions of results, most of them not what you are looking for. What if there was a way to find the best sites and news on that topic in one place? That would be pretty great. Well that is what niche social media sites do. Say you are looking for information on web design, you could check out sites like Design Newz, The Web Blend, Design Bump and Design Float to get more targeted searches in the design niche.

Use Email to Reach Followers

It’s important to be able to reach the membership you have. Many bloggers offer subscriptions via RSS, but you should be using email subscriptions as well. Many people may not be interested in new ways of keeping up to date with your blog, but would have no problem getting updates via email which is still one of the biggest forms of online communication. There are some great tools available to help you create and maintain an email list such as MailChimp, Aweber, and ConstantContact. Add email subscriptions now if you haven’t already and look for a bump in traffic.

Get on Twitter and Facebook

Once you start getting a following who knows you’re someone interesting to listen to, you can easily connect with them and keep them up to date. If they like what they see, they are more likely to generate reposts through their network and will keep coming back for more. There are some great tools to automate publishing your blog posts directly to your Twitter or Facebook such as Twitter Feed, Tweet Deck, HootSuite, and various WordPress plugins like Twitter Tools, Yourls, and WP to Twitter. Make sure you are engaging your followers and giving them interesting posts to click. When using Twitter try to use hash tags and tag people in your tweets to keep it interesting. If you’re on Facebook make an awesome fan page and update it with some cool teaser pictures to get people back to your blog posts. Remember to add buttons to your posts so people can share your articles right after reading.

Network With Other Bloggers

The blogger that stands alone has a stark disadvantage compared to one with connections to others in the industry. Think of blogs like little islands in a big ocean. People might happen by and listen to what you have to say, but think of how things would change if the first person they happened by told them about your blog and handed them a map to get there! From guest writers to sharing tweets or articles with friends and followers to extra exposure via links, a blogger with connections is going to be the most successful.

Make Your Headlines Pop

Interesting and engaging material are what readers are looking for. An awesome catchy headline about even a moderately interesting topic will grab anyone’s attention and get them reading. Studies have shown that eighty percent of people just scan the headline of an article. Studies have shown that eighty percent of people just scan the headline of an article.Taking the time to learn to write a great headline will give you a huge boost, if you need some tips check out How to Write Magnetic Headlines on Copyblogger.

Optimize Your Title Keywords

New readers will probably find your articles with Google. People looking for your content are using keywords to search Google.You can capitalize on this by using relevant keywords for each post you make, bringing new readers directly to your post. From there its a short step to the rest of your blog and generating views on related articles you might have. Give some thought to what terms people who are looking for the information you are presenting will search for. If you want to test your thoughts out and see what keywords are hot, check out Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

Link Back to Your Own Posts

If you’ve been blogging for a while you probably have a lot of older posts kicking around the back of your blog gathering dust. You put a lot of effort into those posts when you made them and the information on them could still be really useful to a lot of people but for whatever reason isn’t ranking well in search engines. If you write a related article, find a way to add a link to your older post and remember to use targeted keywords. If someone came to read your new post and found it interesting they’ll be more likely to click your link to find out more on that topic. Just remember no one wants you to go crazy with links everywhere, keep it to things that are actually related.

Collaborate with Other Bloggers

Like you, everyone is looking to promote their own blog. I want to promote my blog, you want to promote your blog, everyone wants to promote their blog. If four of us got together we could write a series of articles on a topic. This would do a couple of great things: First, it would promote your blog on three other blogs, giving your links and exposure to a new group of people. Second, it will create backlinks to your site as the other bloggers link their collaboration pieces. Third, it will create something for readers to look forward to as they wait for the next post in the series. Doing this all the time might be a little much, but from time to time its fun, mixes things up and is a great way to promote yourself.

Link to Popular Posts

Lots of sites have links to their most popular or interesting posts somewhere on their site. This sidebar has links to posts on What Makes StumbleUpon Unique? and Gaining Subscribers Through Social Media because those have been some of the most popular topics on the blog and are common things that someone might come to the blog looking for and would make good starting points. This is extremely helpful in getting more page views from your visitors because it gets them to click through other articles and makes it easier for them to find interesting content on your site.

Be a Guest Writer

Writing as a guest in someones blog is a bit like being invited to a party where you don’t know anyone but you all have a shared interest. You get to speak to a lot of people who don’t really know you, tell them what you’re about and give them your contact information so they can get in touch with you again. If they liked you they’ll come and check out your party and you can form a wonderful, lasting relationship and live happily ever after. Just remember, not everyone will like you so don’t sweat it if you don’t get a massive surge of traffic, just keep doing your own thing.

Be Unique and Have Some Personality

If your blog is just a mash-up of topics grabbed from others and presented with no personal flair, you aren’t really running a blog, but something more like a newspaper company that only publishes last weeks news. Think about your niche, read other blogs and then think some more and come up with an original idea and give it some personality. Especially in a bustling niche, unique content is going to be valued and you may find that such a post is passed around for you by users on social media sites and blogs.

Keep Your Top Posts up to Date

If your blog is established you probably have some popular posts generating page views and bringing in unique users each month. These high traffic posts are important to the traffic of your entire blog and should be treated well and taken care of. Say a twitter update comes out and changes the details of a how-to post. People coming in to find out that information will be disappointed and frustrated if they find old, inaccurate information. Along with the benefits that come from avoiding upset readers, you can generate even more traffic by announcing that the topic has been updated, relaunching a post you already know was successful.

Rebecca Chelsey’s recent post on ways to spark our creativity got me thinking about the next step: how to take that creativity and turn it into meaningful sentences on the page. In other words, what we do with that spark of inspiration will determine the success or setbacks we face when we blog.

I’m a firm believer in the importance of pre-writing as a great way to take advantage of our inspiration. Pre-writing helps us bloggers to get down onto paper the ideas in our head. It helps us use language to explain our ideas. Through pre-writing, we can figure out exactly what it is we are trying to say. We can think of pre-writing as the laboratory in which we can test out and refine our ideas before we share them with an audience.

What follows, then, are a few of my favorite pre-writing exercises that help me figure out what exactly I’m trying to say. I hope they are useful to you as well, and if you can think of others, please share them in the comments section.

Brainstorm

Perhaps the most basic of all the pre-writing strategies, brainstorming is a good way to quickly populate a list of ideas related to your main concept or subject matter. While it won’t generate solid and well-written content, it will give you a list of ideas that you can go on to further elaborate upon.

Make an Outline

Outlining is a great way to organize our thoughts. For example, if we have a series of loosely related ideas, we can use an outline format to help us figure out how the exact relationships between them. One idea might be subordinate to another. One idea might cause the existence of another. The hierarchy of an outline allows you to figure out those relationships and then create the order in which you think you should explain those ideas to readers of your post. Once you fill in the parts of the outline, it’s just a simple matter of applying that to a post with an introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion.

Envision Your Ideas

This method of pre-writing asks you to envision your ideas through idea-mapping or web-mapping. It’s a great form of pre-writing if you have a large list of ideas, but are not sure at all of how they are related. When you can sketch them out on a big piece of paper and form a map between them, then you’ll better be able to see which idea clusters are more important or need to be explicated more thoroughly than the others. Although this won’t help you get some strong sentences down for your post, it will help you understand the nature of the subject matter in a more situational way.

Profile Your Audience

If you have a good grasp of the idea you’d like to turn into a post but are unsure of how to write it for your audience, you should try to write a profile of your audience in relation to the subject matter of your post. When you write the profile, try to ask yourself questions about how you think the audience would respond to your post, especially an audience that is at first resistant or skeptical to your content.

For example, if they might disagree with your main point, think of ways you could encourage them to lower their guard. Or, if they might not at first understand your content, think of ways to make it accessible to them. You can use this profile to help you write your way into the post.

About the Author:

This guest post is contributed by Katheryn Rivas, who particularly enjoys writing about online universities.  She can be reached via email at: katherynrivas87@gmail.com.