Tutorial Blog » Website Promotion

5 Free Ways to Market Your Blog

Spencer Spellman — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:00:46 +0000

It’s no secret that the ailing economy has hit everyone, even us bloggers who depend so heavily on Google Adsense and page impressions. It’s become increasingly harder to grow and maintain those high page views, while also competing with other bloggers in your niche.

As a blogger you don’t want to pay a high rate to advertise your blog and risk not getting a return on your investment; nor do you want to do an adwords campaign. You want quick, easy and free ideas for marketing your blog. (...)
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The Basics: How to use StumbleUpon to Increase Your Website Traffic

Spencer Spellman — Sat, 02 May 2009 18:00:21 +0000

The title says it all; we create websites, blogs, wikis, forums, profiles and so on because we want increased traffic. Why else would tools like Facebook and Twitter be increasing at such a staggering rate? By this point, you’ve got to be familiar with the essentials, at least Facebook, if not Myspace as well, and maybe you’re starting to familiarize yourself with Twitter. But have you heard of StumbleUpon? (...)
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Here’s What’s on My Apple iPhone Today

Michael Alexander — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 14:20:45 +0000

On the side, I write for a few blogs, one of which is AppCraver, an Apple iPhone applications review site. With each review I do, I get smarter about which apps are truly useful to people like you and me. Here’s what’s been on my iPhone lately:

Bringing in the reads and feeds

The best news app I’ve come across is Mobile News Network. It’s AP news that you can configure in a variety of ways: top news, local news, sports, business, politics and on and on. The interface is super clean. News—whether as text, images or video—comes down surprisingly fast over Wi-Fi. You also get it all in one shot, so you can read it offline. Mobile News Network is ad-supported, but it’s free.

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How to Decide what is Newsworthy for Your Press Release

Michael Alexander — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 16:09:11 +0000

I’ve embarked on a series of posts on press relations and so far, I’ve covered the benefits of writing press releases and how to format them. What are the potential topics you might consider for your press release–what is newsworthy, in other words–is today’s topic. I’ll tell you soon on how to write and shape copy for your press release for maximum exposure online.

What’s newsworthy is often common sense but it can also be subjective. It’s something to think about the next time you decide to write a press release.

I’ve been asked to write press releases that were just plain goofy. Take, for example, the time a CEO of a company had one of his people hire me to write a press release about his having attended a week-long, racing-car track school. I swear I’m not making it up. Why he thought playing with his stick shift was newsworthy, I have no idea. That’s just the way some CEOs are, I guess.

Just about everything of interest to the general public is newsworthy. That’s what many dictionaries and Wikipedia articles will tell you but don’t believe it.

Increasingly, what’s newsworthy is tightly focused topics that interest narrow segments of people. It may be the audience of a particular media outlet, it may be your customers, it may even be your employees. Define your audience first and then figure out whether you have something newsworthy to say.

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12 Things You Should Know about Formating Press Releases

Michael Alexander — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 16:44:02 +0000

How many times have you gone to your mailbox, flipped through the envelopes and tossed the junk mail in the recycle bin unopened? All the time, right?

Journalists do the same thing with most press releases they receive, whether sent by snail mail or email. As I wrote the other day, I’m planning on writing a series of posts on how to put news about your business into press releases, how to get people to read them and (one hopes) to act on them. I’ve already written about the benefits of writing press releases for your site to promote your business and for your client.

Let’s begin with the begin–i.e. the fundamentals. Here’s a quick run down on how to format your press release whether for print or electronic media:

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Journalism’s ‘Dirty Little Secret’ Helps You and Your Clients

Michael Alexander — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 16:01:41 +0000

I was collaborating with a designer friend a couple of weeks back on a Web site for a small, but ambitious, client. The client’s primary interest was presenting his business in the shiniest possible way–no surprise there. But I raised the point with him that although we could build an awesome-looking and functional site for him, there was a lot more to think about than the site’s look and feel.

Content matters, as we all know. My point with this client was that he needed to put more info on his site than his marketing info and his service’s unique selling points or USPs. My primary objective was to convince him that his site must have quality content and in sufficient quantity to attract visitors and push up his search engine rankings. I’m not talking here about the usual SEO kinds of like tweaking tags and other things, although that was part of the discussion.

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How to Build Your Business During a Recession

Michael Alexander — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 15:37:52 +0000

Marketwire, a press-release distribution service, has a free white paper aimed at helping you market your products and services when you must do more with less in these tough economic times.

“Top 10 Strategies for Boosting ROI Despite Shrinking Budgets and Dwindling Resources,” suggests creative strategies for improving search engine optimization, engaging social media communities, maximizing online communications, reaching out to journalists, setting goals and measuring results.

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Improve Your SEO Part 3 – Attention To Detail

Philip Beel — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 23:00:55 +0000

Welcome to the final installment of “Improve Your SEO.” This topic has been spread over three posts, so if you haven’t already, check out part 1 and part 2 of the series. This final post will concentrate on the final touches of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which you can implement to improve the performance of your site. The topics have been broken down with examples to give you a better understanding of how you can implement the changes.

This tutorial will cover splash pages, backlinking and javascript implementation, as well as URL structure and folder directory layout, all of which are extremely important in optimising your websites search engine friendliness and increasing traffic to your website.(...)
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How to Make Your Site is Journalist Friendly and Increase Publicity

Michael Alexander — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 17:43:02 +0000

There isn’t a journalist alive who doesn’t use the Web to develop story ideas, find breaking news, research feature articles and more. Here are some of the primary reasons a journalist might want to visit your site:(...)
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Use Customer Success Stories to Promote Your Web Design Business

Michael Alexander — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 14:56:31 +0000

Customer success stories–also referred to as case studies–are a terrific way to bolster your Web and print marketing business. They’re convincing because they provide third-party testimonials of how a customer used your service to solve a problem.

You can write customer success stories as narratives (like magazine articles) or structure them in a format that you use with all your success stories. For marketing, I prefer the structured approach because I can get the point across with less copy than a narrative form.

Business people are willing to read more than consumers but I still believe brevity is better for case studies, especially when published as a Web page or in an e-newsletter. One or two pages does the trick for me.

My approach to writing success stories is to first state the problem, then describe how the company’s product or service solved the problem, and then wrap up with the benefits of the solution or what most business people would call their ROI, or “return on investment.”(...)
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