Selling advertising directly to companies who want to put banner ads or sponsored links on your blog can take quite a bit of time, but it is often fairly lucrative. If you have a lot of contacts in industries that are related to the topic of your blog, you may want to try to go this route. People who have a strong background in sales and are experienced at pitching proposals can make quite a bit of money by renting blog space to interested companies. The most serious problem with this model is that you often have to build quite a sizable readership before you can attract advertisers, which can mean that you have to do several months of work before you start to make money blogging.

As blogging becomes a more and more lucrative business, a lot of established companies are considering how they can get into the action. One way that companies are capitalizing on the blog movement is by having blogs that provide a kind of friendly face for their corporation. Often, a company will employ an established blogger to create a weblog designed specifically to appeal to that company’s customers and to create positive associations with the brand in consumers’ minds. More than one writer who never even dreamed that he or she could make money blogging has been approached by a company and offered quite a pretty penny for this kind of gig.

I think you’d be as shocked as I was to hear the answers.

My biggest upset is with this:

Question: In respects to social media websites, such as Twitter, how does a business professional, like myself, implement and entertain the concept of obtaining clients for my business?

Answer: I don’t know. I really don’t know because there is no answer to that. In fact, Twitter is still trying to figure that out themselves. I know someone who has a list of 100,000 followers and gets absolutely nothing out of it.

Now… these are social media experts, alright? Experts on social media… shouldn’t they know how to make money from it? If not, why be an expert in it?

The REAL answer to that question is COMMUNICATION!

Yes, there are such factors such as what type of business industry, product, service and so on, but the NUMBER 1 way to getting business out of sites like Twitter is COMMUNICATION.

You have to post updates. You have to initiate conversations. You have to maintain connections. You have to follow up. This can be VERY time consuming. But that’s what it will take to get clients off of these sites.

It works. No doubt about it.

However, there are automated services to initiate conversations. There are automated services that automatically responds and talk to individuals. There are automated services that automatically add and remove followers (and non-followers, respectively).

Finally… just outsource the damn thing! It’s not hard. It will save you time and money.

Most of all, Twitter already figured out how to make money. They have their own PPC program where you can send out ads to folks who mention a specific keyword term… oh, but Twitter still doesn’t know how to make money yet. Sure.

SEO Trends

Yes, they did mention that Google indexes Twitter updates. That’s news from like October, 2009 or something. I can’t remember for sure.

However, why didn’t they mention that Google is also indexing Facebook pages? Wouldn’t that be something important the audience should know?

How ’bout the idea of Google “PR” no longer being called PR?

Question: I remember the good ol’ days… like last month… when I do a search for “web design dallas texas”, I would get a local map results, but now they’re gone. Why is that?

Answer: Just like many of the beta programs Google comes out with, they sometime stay beta for years and never really get released. With this in particular case, Google has determined that certain keywords require maps and some don’t. I.E. someone searching for a dentist would want to know exactly where it is, but one who searches for a design firm might not care for a map.

Actually, the answer to the question was pretty dead on. The reason I bring this up though is that, I think everyone there missed the importance of this answer. The person who answered probably doesn’t even realize it.

To an SEO, this is huge. It should be ringing the fire alarm and gun shots are going off to indicate that this is CRITICAL information. I’ll keep this to myself unless I get enough inquiries about it.

Website Feedback

One person there got some feedback from the panel on how to improve his website. Most of the advice was pretty sound, but still lacking in terms of importance.

1. You need a 301 – check.
   - Yes, a 301 redirect will definitely be helpful for his site since his site loads individually with and without “www”.
2. You need better titles – check.
   - Yes, a more descriptive title (max of 63 characters) will help with ranking better.
3. You need to use alt tags – check.
   - Yes, having alt tags in your images will help generate traffic via the image search engines and get the images indexed.
4. You should use less codes – check.
   - Yes, search engines like Google do consider a codes to content ratio. It’s just part of their quality score and will considered when ranking your site for specific search terms.
5. You should have a site tracker – check.
   - Yes, you should have a way to track your visitors and see what they are doing. However, they should not be scaring the guy as if it’s the end of the world. He DOES still have his weblog, which provides much similar data, but in raw format. As much as I like Google Analytics, it is still only about 75% accurate in picking up data.

These are good stuff, but here’s what’s missing (and no, I won’t cover everything, but these are important):

1. Don’t worry about the meta keywords.
   - Google doesn’t use them! Yet they’re still telling this person to concentrate on that. Here’s proof.
2. Include meta descriptions.
   - Oh, yeah! This is ultra important in your search results. Well, important to the user, that is. Description meta tags are NOT included in Google’s score to determine how well you rank. However, what you describe is important to the user and determine whether they want to look or not.
3. I’m not going to say it.
   - I was trying to help the guy out, but he blew me off when I told him about the description meta tag. He’s missing out on an instant 5-figure income just by implementing this simple concept. It’s sad, but it’s not my problem. Let’s put it this way – ranking better and higher is the LEAST of his concerns.

Well, that’s all for tonight. There’s just too much to talk about. Have a good one and I hope to provide more useful information for you in the future.

As an extra bonus tip for you, since you’re reading, if you’re concerned about keyword density. Don’t. Keyword density absolutely does not matter. What’s important is the flow and ease of reading your content. Concentrate on connecting with your users rather than the search engines. Search engines like to play hard-to-get, so just ignore them.

Sincerely,
Kevin Lam

P.S. I almost forgot. The guys there kept  saying “content is king”. No it’s not and even if it is, backlinks is queen. And we all know the queen controls the king (look at the game Chess!).

Just because you wrote it, it doesn’t mean you’ll instantly and magically have visitors. It REALLY depends on the level of competition, how many people are writing about it, how many people are searching for terms related to it, how well your site is ranked, when your page/post was indexed, how many backlinks it has and so on.

Point is, the content must have relevance to the search queries and the page/post should have good backlinks to ensure getting visitors. Yes, there are times I’d write about something and I’d immediately get traffic. That is not always the case though.