Add Your WordPress Blog to Your LinkedIn Account

Posted on 23. Apr, 2010 by Tracy Sigler in Blogging, SEO, Social Media

Here’s a short video I made for my friend Dan. It’s really easy to add a WordPress blog your LinkedIn profile. As you can see from the video it took me less two minutes to do it, and that’s while I was blabbing about it. If you have a business-to-business enterprise, or if you’re a professional or consultant, a blog is an excellent way to demonstrate your expertise and experience while providing information of real value to your target market. But wait there’s more! Continually producing high quality content also has a massive SEO (search engine optimization) benefit. Your site will show up higher in search rankings if you’re using keywords related to your business. It’s a little more complicated than that, but not much.

If you’re going to do the work of creating great content you should get as much leverage from it as possible by incorporating it into your social media marketing efforts and social networking sites. So take two minutes to integrate your blog with your LinkedIn. Once it’s done, new blog posts will be automatically be added. Now that’s modern marketing. You might be surprised how many people will find your content through your LinkedIn profile.

Let us know if you have any questions.

Tracking Traffic from a Redirected Domain, Is Your Marketing Working?

Posted on 26. Mar, 2010 by Tracy Sigler in Advertising, Small Business Tools

There are a zillion ways to do this. Here are two that are easy to implement and will be good enough for most of us.

Let’s say you just bought a billboard, or an ad in local newspaper or magazine, and you want to know if this type of advertising will drive traffic to your site where people can learn more about your company, services or products. You could use something like “mycompany.com/newspaper” and track the traffic to that URL. But most people won’t bother typing in the extra stuff, unless there is some special content there or other incentive. Plus it’s hard to remember. Domain forwarding to the rescue!

Probably a better option is to use a special, dedicated domain name for that particular ad. Something like “MyCompanyNC.com” or “GetMyCompany.com.” You get the picture. Just add a simple modifier or possibly use an altogether different but descriptive term (e.g. “SpringfieldPlumbers.com” instead of “JohnsonPlumbing.com”).

Now what? Well, you use domain forwarding or redirecting, call it whatever, and point that thing to a special page, or tracking URL, on your real site. I’m going to outline two different ways to do this that are fairly easy for non-techie types to implement. In fact, you can even combine the two if you want, but that might get tricky.

Option 1

Tracking a Domain Redirect with a Landing Page with Google Analytics

  1. Register the new domain that will be in your ad.
  2. If you don’t already have it, install Google Analytics on your main site.
  3. Create a landing page on your real site: “mycompany.com/landingpage.html” (Name it whatever you want, but make sure the Google Analytics tracking code is added to this page.)
  4. Go back to registrar you used to register the new domain. Edit the “host record” settings to redirect it to the landing page you just created on the real site.
  5. Use the new domain in your print, billboard, etc. ad.
  6. Check Google Analytics for results: Content > Landing Pages

Option 2 (This assumes your site is running WordPress. High five if it is.)

Tracking a Domain Redirect with WordPress and the Redirection Plugin

  1. Register the new domain that will be in your ad.
  2. Install the Redirection plugin for WordPress.
  3. Create a fake tracking URL for your real site and add the redirect using the plugin: “mycompany.com/billboard” (Name it whatever you want, but make sure you the exact same URL in the next step.)
  4. Go back to registrar you used to register the new domain. Edit the “host record” settings to redirect it to  a fake tracking URL for your real site: “mycompany.com/billboard”
  5. Use the new domain in your print, billboard, etc. ad.
  6. Check WordPress admin panel for results: Log in > Tools > Redirection

How easy is that? Questions? We’re here to help.

SEO Blog Post Writing Checklist

Posted on 27. Oct, 2009 by Tracy Sigler in Blogging, SEO, WordPress

This is a version of the blog post checklist our writers use when they submit an article for one of our clients’ sites. The only items I have omitted are related to things that are part of our internal work flow. I’m giving it all away! Definitely watch the video because some of these items need explaining. We’ll do some more focused videos later where we can dive deep into things writing meta descriptions and title tags that can help “win the click” on the search engine results pages.

We use a checklist because we want to keep the quality consistently high, from writer to writer, blog to blog, post to post. It’s important that your business is regularly producing high quality content using SEO best practices. Doesn’t matter if the business is plumbing, a restaurant, or shoe store. Modern marketing means creating relevant media for your audience. If this type of blogging seems like more work than you want to do for your marketing program talk to us. This is what we do.

Check out the checklist below.
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Video: Keyword Research for SEO Blogging with WordPress

Posted on 07. Sep, 2009 by Tracy Sigler in Blogging, SEO, WordPress

As part of our SEO efforts we write content for the blogs of our small business clients. This is how we make sure our bloggers are using the same keywords that people are searching for. If you have any questions please leave them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them. Thanks!