Blog 3: Engaging your Audience

[http://www.searchengineguide.com/stoney-degeyter/5-engaging-ways-to-engage-your-audience.php]

Getting attention
Every page of your site is a landing page. From the moment visitors land on that first page you need to grab their attention. This doesn't require any gimmicks, but it does require the ability to organize your information in a compelling and visually friendly way.

Reassurance
Each page of your site must continue to assure your visitors that they are where they need to be to get the information they came looking for. Placement and words used in page headings, contextual links, bullet points, etc. can all be used to reassure your visitors that you have the information they need without much more than a quick glance.

What's in it for them?
If your visitors can't immediately figure out "What's in it for me?" then you will quickly lose their interest. Your visitors need to quickly find resolutions to the questions, product information, benefits and ultimately the question of why they should buy from you. If this information cannot be addressed on each page, provide obvious links to the pages that do.

SEO vs. usability
On-page SEO should enhance, rather than distract from, the visitor's engagement on the site. If your copy is poorly developed because you're trying too hard to insert keywords into the text, then your visitors will be pulled away from, rather than engaged in, the message. Good SEO considers users, not just search engines.

Textual links
Textual links should be used as frequently as necessary to provide a customer-engaged navigation path. Contextual links, as opposed to standard navigation elements, allow visitors to click through finding the information that most interests them without forcing them to think about where they want to go next. Provide the path and they will follow. When you don't engage your visitors by providing them the information they want in a way that speaks to their wants and needs, then you're mostly just speaking at users rather than to customers. You want your visitors to have a personal experience as they interact with your website. Make them feel as if you developed the site just for them.

What is SEO?
[Wikipedia]
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Typically, the earlier a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

The acronym "SEO" can also refer to "search engine optimizers," a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term "search engine friendly" may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems and shopping carts that are easy to optimize.

Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or Spamdexing, use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that degrade both the relevance of search results and the user-experience of search engines. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques in order to remove them from their indices.

Here is a link that will give you some useful S.E.O. tips for bloggers.
[ http://www.johntp.com/2006/04/21/8-simple-seo-tips-for-blogs/ ]

Blogging #2

Blog 2: What makes an Interesting Blog

1. Write the blog you want to write

Let’s be honest. A lot of bloggers care about clicks, and hits, and all those other single syllabic words that in some way indicate that people are reading your blog. Only ten page views a day? Why that’s terrible!

Because of this, bloggers tend to write the blog they think other people want to read. Sure this sounds good in practice, but imagine yourself a year from now – will you still be able to write on that topic? Will you still be able to cover the same information from a different slant? Probably not. Not if you hate every single moment of your blogging experience.

If you like video games, and you read about them, think about them, play them, and go to sleep dreaming of them, that you’ll probably do alright writing about video games. If you’re obsessed with comics – same thing. Heck, maybe you love shoes. You could write for hours about pumps, and heals, and – I don’t even know what those are, so I’ll just stop there. But you do, and so you could write a shoe blog.

However, if you love shoes, you’ll probably want to stay away from video game reviews, even if you know that would get you more clicks than the variously numbered MJ stylies. You know?

It’s your personal style and flair that will bring people back day after day after day. And that’s what you want – Just like in Wayne’s World, first they tell two people, then they tell two people, and so on, and so on, and so on…

2. Community Building

Make sure you have comments enabled. People love to write on your blog. In some cases, this will just be so they can have a link to their site on yours. But in other cases, it’s because they really care about what you have to say. They will want to communicate back and forth.

Now what this also means is that you will have to reply to their comments. I know – I know – terrible, right? But still, if you want to get your voice out there you better be ready to communicate. This back and forth will allow you to become more than just a faceless name attached to posts. You will develop a personality, and people will be drawn to that.

Forums and message boards are a good way to start community building too.

3. Multimedia is Fantastic!

Honestly, would you rather see screens of text, or screens of text with pictures and videos built into it? Well, answer this – how daunting would your text books be without pictures? So throw them in! Also – try not to use a default template. It just looks lazy. It will turn people off.

Blogging #1

Blogging #1

You will create a blog with no less than ten well thought out entries. You will be responsible for creating a website, and maintaining it. Your mark will be based on the layout of your blog, and the quality of its entries.

What is blogging?

Blogging is the creation of an internet journal. Or a Web log as some might have once called it. While they have existed for well over a decade and a half, they gained popularity in the last ten years with sites such as live journal, and more recently blogger and wordpress, making the site creation and hosting a breeze.

Tell me more of this blogger.

All the sources I use for site creation, and template construction will be based towards blogger. It is a free website that makes blog updating and creating a breeze. Feel free to check it out over at http://www.blogger.com/ within a matter of minutes you can have a site up and running using one of their default templates.

What will we learn in this unit?

1. What makes an interesting blog
2. Engaging your audience
3. Podcasting
4. how to publicize your blog
5. Community building

Start ‘er up!

So here you are, about to publish your voice on the internet. But wait, what exactly is your voice? And who cares what you have to say? If you look at livejournal – nobody . Nobody cares what you have to say, unless they are your friends. But lets be honest, how many times has a google search brought you up to an ol’ LJ site? Not too many.

So your mission for today – it seems simple, but I assure you it is not – will be choosing your blog topic. That’s right: good blogs need a stable topic. We’re not even going to look at content yet.

Here are the rules:

- you can not use any of the following topics

o your life

o your friend’s lives

o your cat’s life

o your [any other animal’s] life

§ unless told from the animal’s perspective. Cats still banned

o drugs, pornography, anything else that is not ‘school-appropriate’

So what are you going to do now? With all those gone, what do you do? Well here are some tips!

[source: http://weblogs.about.com/od/bloggingtips/tp/ChoosingBlogTopic.htm]
1. Choose a Topic You're Passionate About

A successful blog is updated frequently (often several times a day). If your blog has a chance at success, you need to keep your content fresh, which means you need to consistenly update your blog. Make sure you choose a topic for your blog that you feel strongly about and truly enjoy. Otherwise, writing about it will feel stale very quickly. You need to be able to stay motivated about your blog's topic for a long time.

2. Choose a Topic You Like to Discuss with Other People

Successful blogs require two-way conversation between you (the blogger) and your audience (your readers). As readers leave comments on your blog or email you to discuss your posts in further detail, you need to be responsive and receptive to them. Your blog's long-term success will depend on the sense of community you can create around it.

3. Choose a Topic You Don't Mind Debating with Other People

The blogoshpere is made up of people from all walks of life with varying opinions. As your blog grows, more and more people will find it, and some of those people may not agree with everything you write. Successful bloggers enoy discussing their blogs' topics from all angles and appreciate a healthy debate.

4. Choose a Topic You're Not Overly Sensitive About

As your blog grows and more people find it, many are apt to not just disagree with you, but actually disagree so strongly with you that they may attack you personally. You need to have a thick skin to deflect personal attacks and strongly opposing opinions.

5. Choose a Topic You Enjoy Researching

The blogosphere is constantly changing and one of the most unique aspects of blogs is their ability to provide fresh, meaningful content and discussions about a wide variety of topics. In order for your blog to be successful, you need to enjoy reading about your blog's topic and keeping up with news and current events related to it thereby enabling you to keep your blog's content interesting and relevant to readers.

By the end of this class you will need to have completed the following:

Blog Topic: ____________________________________________________

Detailed Explaination of what you’ll write about: ______________________

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______________________________________________________________

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Blog Title: _____________________________________________________

[this is important, it will show up in search engines, and needs to engage]

Post ideas: _____________________________________________________

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