You should already be familiar with these sites!

That’s right, Guerilleros! As I promised, today we are going to look at how YOU can build a loyal fan base around your blog! I discussed the importance of a blog in the last post, and today I am going to give you 6 steps to follow for building a blog community that can attract real attention. Everything in it is easy, and with a little maintenance, you can have a killer blog following!

1) Provide Quality Content! (Duh!)

No one is going to read a blog with nothing on it, or worse, nothing good on it. So get a writer, or sharpen your pencil, because without some awesome content, written well, no one cares about your blog. Should this even be listed as a step?

The key is quality. An excellent test for this is to ask your self, Would I put this on my personal blog? If the answer is No, get back to writing. And it can’t be stressed enough: A Blog Is Not An Advertisement! You’re trying to give value to your readers, not sell them something.

2) Comment, Comment, and Comment Some More!

You can pack in as many keywords as you like, but that method is going to take some time to yeild results. Wouldn’t it be nice to find a large group of people who would be likely to be interested in your blog, all at once? You can! Unless you are blogging about something really obscure, someone else is already blogging about it. So go to their sites and leave comments.

But don’t just agree and leave a link. That’s not helping you. Leave insightful comments that show you know what’s up in your subject. Leave enough comments, and the readers will follow. Keep leaving comments, and you might get a link back! It takes time, but it will work!

3) Socialize Your Blog!

This is easy as pie. Put your posts up on Digg, StumbleUpon, all the major social bookmarking sites. This is a social media marketing page, and since you’re reading it, this too should be a given.

4) Keep Socializing!

Seriously, keep at it! Every word you write should go on all of these sites. And not just your writings either. you want to be very active on these sites, so people start to recognize your name, and trust you as a source for high caliber content.

5) Share the Page!

No one goes to just one person for advice, and that’s true for your blog, too! So instead of letting the reader go somewhere else for that second opinion, bring it to them. Ask other blog authors to write a piece for your site. They should be honored you asked, plus it’s free publicity for them, as well as a way to increase their followers with your followers. And your fans stay loyal, because you brought them a whole new place to learn from. Win-win for everyone!

6) Spread the Word Domestically!

Nothing is more aggrevating than asking an employee of your clients if they saw their picture on the blog, and they reply “What blog?” Really? Why are we even bothering, if your client’s employees don’t even know about it?

The largest fan base is initially  composed of an extended network made up of the friends of people directly connected to the blog. AKA, the employee’s friends and families are going to get the word out a lot faster than you. Use it!

That’s it folks! Building a blog community doesn’t get any easier than that. Yeah, it’s a little time consuming, but it’s worth it. Once you have a loyal fan base, you’re set. And speaking of loyal fan bases, make sure you join the revolution, and become a Social Media Guerilla!

Related posts:

1. The Importance of Building a Blog Community for Your Business
2. Social Guerilla Marketing Long Term Battle: Building a Community
3. How to Get People to Read!(At Least a Little)

Wait, that's not 3.0!

Bet you thought the Guerilla Chefe was back when you saw that boring title, didn’t you? Sorry, Guerilleros. It’s still Guerilla Roberto. This week however, the Chefe did pick the topic and that’s why I picked the title.  Personally, I would have made a pun. But pun’s don’t do so well in SEO. So let’s get down to business and discuss why blogs are so important to any business now!First, let’s clarify a bit. There are two main types of businesses I’m talking about.

1. The Type that sells a Product
2. The Type that sells a Service

And the reasons are about the same for both, though you may find some differences.

For a business that sells,  the blog community is it’s free promotional staff. People before internet bought things because they were convinced by clever ads or commercials. Their pool of people they could ask about a product was limited, and they were unlikely to get valuable feedback.

Now however, everyone can make and read comments about products all over the internet. Everyone’s a critic. Now, everyone can learn all the details and pro’s and con’s of a product from other people who have used it, and who they trust more than the company, because they know the people aren’t trying to sell them. It’s a case of consumers being jaded to standard advertising.

However, a business with it’s own blog being updated regularly can build a large base of followers if it has quality content that appeals to people. Whether the content is a detailing of events, or just information related somewhat to the product they are selling, people will read it if it’s good. And then they recommend it to other people on other sites, increasing your base followers.  And with all of these people, they are likely to look to you for your product or service should the need arise. Thereby, making you money.

Indeed, the Guerilla Chefe had a radio interview just because of this site. Word of mouth can get you free advertising in multiple ways!

Make sure you join us next week when I detail a strategy for building a blog community quickly!

Related posts:

1. Social Guerilla Marketing Long Term Battle: Building a Community
2. Does Your Business Suffer From Social Media Anxiety?
3. A Change Has Come…

Use your social media brain and get a real wordpress blog

On our last post I showed you how easy it is to transfer all of your blogger content to a brand new wordpress blog. It showed how wordpress can host all of your content with a few quick clicks.

I also pointed you in the direction of a full tutorial that shows how to get a reliable wordpress blog hosting.

So what is your excuse for having a free blog?

If you’re a social media guerillero looking to dominate whatever battle you’re fighting, what’s stopping you from having a decent, professional blog hosted at your own domain?

I’d love to hear your answers.

What could possibly make you use a weird address like yourblog.blogspot.com instead of a simple yourblog.com?

The Image/Brand Effect

I may be offending some people with this comment – but do you know what comes to my mind everytime somebody tells me their blog address and it’s a blogger blog?

NEWBIE.

And the fact is – I’m right.

And even if I’m wrong, and they’re not newbies, they’re just too lazy to transfer their stuff to a new domain?

Somehow this doesnt compute in my brain.

The SEO aspect

I honestly cant say that having your own domain is better for seo – but I do know that one of the main reasons people just dont transfer their blogger over to a real wordpress domain is that they’re afraid of losing their rankings.

The thing is – the plugins that wordpress offers can make your life a heck of a lot easier when it comes to SEO.

Plus, there are channels you can use to get BLOGSPOT to place a redirect over to your new domain. That should clear most search engine issues.

So, please tell me  - why would ever have a free hosted blog?

Sign up for Hostgator now – and then follow this tutorial to install WordPress on your domain

Talk to you soon!

Related posts:

1. How To Import Your Blogspot Blogger Into A WordPress Blog
2. Integrating Social Media – Blog RSS to Facebook to Twitter Automatically
3. Jeff Johnson’s Cool (and free) Traffic-Getting SEO Plugin For WordPress

Quick fix for Jeff Johnson's Plugin will improve its results

A couple of days ago I publicly revealed my secret weapon for social media guerilla when it comes to wordpress plugins – jeff johnson’s free traffic-getting plugin. This cool plugin for wordpress combines major plugins in one package that is easy to install (less than 10 minutes) and can REALLY boost your SEO.

But of course, amongst the 100+ core changes that the plugin makes within WordPress, I dont agree with one – a big one.

I’ve explained before the optimal permalink structure for wordpress – Jeff Johnson’s plugin goes straight to that permalink structure, but changes one major thing.

This is how the plugin structures your permalinks:

/%post_id%/%postname%/

The problem here is in the first part of the structure, which will use your post ID as part of the URL – post IDS carry very little – if any – relevancy to your post. It’s a random number that wordpress assigns each plugin, no matter what your topic is.

So why would you have unnecessary, irrelevant items on your url?

EXACTLY!

Guerilleros, here’s the one thing you should change after installing Jeff Johnson’s SEO plugin:

/%category%/%postname%/

This simple change will add you post’s category into each permalink url – which will now carry a major addition that can heavily influence your rankings. This is what your posts will look like:

http://socialmediaguerilla.com/blog-traffic/quick-permalink-structure-fix-improves-blog-traffic/

Much better than:

http://socialmediaguerilla.com/?p=89/quick-permalink-structure-fix-improves-blog-traffic/

Yeah, I though so.

But dont let this quick little fix stop you from getting all the other benefits of Jeff’s plugin:

DOWNLOAD IT NOW – it’s still free!

Related posts:

1. Jeff Johnson’s Cool (and free) Traffic-Getting SEO Plugin For WordPress
2. Quick Permalink Structure Fix Improves Blog Traffic!
3. Improve Your Chances To Go Viral On Twitter With Simple Snippet

You’re probably familiar with the wordpress permalink structure showing some sort of date on the url, right? Something like this:

If you know a little bit about SEO, you know that the first place search engines look for keywords is in the domain url. As we see in the example above, 2009/07/10 is not a keyword anybody but a horoscope writer would target.

So, how can you change that silly date insertion to a more interesting, SEO-friendly url?

Changing your Permalink Structure

A permalink is the address given to a blog post, which is an abbreviation for “permanent link”. They are permanent because unlike your main domain url, which changes as you write new posts, the url on your permalinks remain the same. Therefore their importance for SEO.

To make changes to your blog’s permalink structure, follow these instructions:

1. Log into your admin area (blogdomain.con/wp-admin)
2. Scroll down to Settings >> Permalinks

At that point, you’ll see some WordPress suggestions like these:

You don’t want to use any of these. Instead, at the bottom, where you see “Custom Structure”, enter this code:

/%category%/%postname%/

Your configuration should look something like this:

What happens now?

WordPress will use the categories you determine for each post as part of the permalink url, which will include (hopefully) more relevant keywords to your url.

After you’ve finished, your permalink will look like this:

The Difficult Part?

So far, all you had to do was enter a half-a-line code to your wordpress admin area. That was ridicuosly easy.

The part that actually requires some thinking is determining which Categories suit your blog best.

For that, I highly recommend an extensive keyword research.

Make sure your categories:

• are relevant to your content,

• have decent traffic volume,

• are generic enough to hold more than one or two posts.

The key with categories is that they’re not TAGS, but more like umbrellas from where your tags will come out.

After a week of updating all of the permalinks, I experienced a better indexation for most of the keywords within my categories, and an overall blog traffic increase of 20-25%.

It’s definitely worth it.

No related posts.