Kinetic Knowledge Client News – May 2009

Hi Everyone, Happy Spring!

House Keeping

Next Webinar: June 26th, times TBD Now June 29th, 9am or 2pm Mountain Time
You’ll get an invite about two weeks prior via email, keep an eye out :)

Warning! Bait and Switch Scam
Quite a few of our clients have received an email lately from the address lisaevans.personal@gmail.com suggesting that this person subscribed to your blog and has some important tips for you to obtain more email subscribers.  This is a bait and switch email solely trying to get you to buy a footer pop-up product.  Feel free to check it out, but also know that you are likely missing nothing imperative – it’s just a sales pitch.

Psst… We’re Twittering, take a look!
http://twitter.com/kveraldi
http://twitter.com/frerecks

Enjoy!

Chris and Kristen

Take Your Blog to the Next Level: An Overview

If you have not begun to blog regularly, you really must!  Seriously, there is no more cost effective or sustainable way to establish a visible presence online than consistent targeted and well executed blogging! In an environment where our future customers leverage random resources online to research & discover, it is relevant & timely content activity that will:

  • generate more qualified search discovery;
  • generate more voluntary RSS subscription;
  • generate more links, bookmarks, forwards, recommendations;
  • differentiate as dedicated, knowledgeable, trustworthy;
  • establish unique marketplace brand and
  • generate new lead opportunities & sales!

Yes we need good blog solutions, but Google discloses updated site standards for better indexing. Better blogs are a matter of site design, architecture, maintenance and advancement and we work to maintain them for you.

For targeted and highly competitive organic search results alone look at what clients like Bryan Bomba [No. 1 for the search Hinsdale IL Real Estate], California Olive Ranch [No. 6 for search extra virgin olive oil recipes] and Star Power [No. 1 for the search real estate conferences and education] have achieved by blogging.

There are several things we advise that you can do to take your presence online to the next level, here’s a quick overview:

RSS to Email Signup – If you don’t have a “Sign Up to Receive my Blog News by Email” feature on your blog’s homepage, you should. This is one of the best ways to grow your subscriber database and the tools are free through Google. If you need this functionality, please sign-up for a free account at http://feedburner.google.com and send us your login with a request for the functionality. We will install this at no cost – that’s FREE! And remember, people that subscribe are likely to link to you via their own sites & social environments; they may refer you direct and, when they are ready to buy, they will most likely become new client sales!

Analytics - Analtyics are so important in helping you to understand where your blog is performing well and where it could potentially perform better.  Knowing this data allows you to modify perhaps the type of content you provide for better targeting, to target and edit old posts that are still performing in the search engines, to identify whether or not your site is holding visitors, to identify popular pages, to identify who’s driving traffic your way and much more. We offer either Visistat Analytics at $15/month or Google Analytics for a one time installation fee of $25. If a data gather, summary and review interests let us know. This is time consuming work, but if there’s interest on your part we’ll develop a fee based service.

Social Networks

Your RSS Feed - To setup any of these you’ll need your blog’s RSS feed.  This is obtained by adding /feed/ to the end of your blog URL.  For instance ours is: http://www.kineticknowledge.com/feed/

Facebook Pages – Facebook allows you to create a free page to promote your business.  It’s nice because you can hook in your blog feed to automatically republish your articles here.  Here’s where you get started: http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?pages

Facebook Import - You can also import your blog feed into your personal Facebook space using notes.  Each Facebook page seems to be a little different but here’s how it appears in my interface:

  • Login
  • Click on Settings, Application Settings
  • Click on the word Notes at left
  • On the resulting page in the right hand column there should be a link to manage import settings for an external blog
  • On this page you can enter your blogs RSS Feed and Facebook will start importing posts
  • You can also do this with a Facebook App called My Blogs, Notes allows you to add only one RSS feed
  • You can get both twitter and your blogs into FB by using TwitterFeed to post your blogs to Twitter, then using your public RSS feed for Twitter updates (see below)

LinkedIn Import - LinkedIn will also allow a blog import by RSS feed.

  • Login
  • Click on Applications at left
  • Select the “Blog Link” app (not Wordpress!)
  • Follow the simple instructions

Twitter - We can either install a plug-in or you can setup this service yourself using Twitterfeed.com.  I just setup TwitterFeed and it seemed pretty easy.  The key is getting what they refer to as an openID, I used the service they suggested to create one: https://myvidoop.com/ but I think it’s possible to do from several different providers.  Once you have an OpenID, you can login to TwitterFeed.com and setup the connection to your blog (again using your RSS feed).  It’s pretty easy to follow.

Joining Groups – Both Facebook and LinkedIn offer groups – do a search and try to find one that fits your business.  For instance the National Association of Realtors has a LinkedIn group that has over 6,000 members.  If you get approved to join your posts will reach all members, this is a great way to increase visitor numbers!

Commenting on Relevant Blogs – Finding conversations out there that you have expertise on and leaving comments is another way to funnel traffic back to your own blog posts.  Often times the comment area will allow you to add a link – make sure you link to a relevant article you’ve written on the subject and not just your home page.  This one takes a bit of planning but can quickly bear fruit.  Using Google blog search is a good way to find relevant conversations: http://blogsearch.google.com/?hl=en&tab=wb

Blog Design – Your blog’s design is very important! Visitors have tiny attention spans and blogs are very text-based so the traditional look and feel can at times be less sticky. Our new blog site designs have reduced bounce rates [ours by 70%] and increased visitor page views [ours by 300%] for quite a few clients. For one client’s take see: http://kineticknowledge.com/blog/kinetic-blogs/top-edmonton-ab-business-forgoes-website-for-all-encompassing-blog/

And then don’t forget about other useful services we offer such as: