Claim Your Blog on Technorati in 2013

Technorati was the #5 traffic Source for Basic Blog Tips in 2012

In this episode I encourage bloggers to register their blog's in the Technorati blog directory. Currently over 1.3 million blogs are listed and the submission process is simple to do.

A review of the 2012 traffic stats for Basic Blog Tips, my primary blog, shows that because of the directory listing, Technorati became the #5 source of referral traffic for the entire year. 

The benefit of getting visitors from Technorati is that the traffic is highly targeted and engaged. Many of the visitors ended up subscribing to my email list, following me on Twitter or Facebook and subscribing to my YouTube Channel. 

Technorati is "set-it-and-forget-it"

Sign up for an account with Technorati and the process of claiming your blog is pretty straight forward. Enter the title, description and RSS feed for the blog and Technorati will provide you with a claim code. 

The claim code needs to appear inside of a blog post, and this is Technorati's way of verifying that you are the owner or administrator of the site. I recommend adding the code to an existing blog post (versus publishing a post just for the purpose of the claim). You'll receive an email once your site is verified and basically that's it! That is all you need to do in order to complete the procedure - "set-it-and-forget-it".

I first noticed the increase in traffic and back links when I was monitoring my blog's progress in Google Webmaster Tools. And at the end of 2012 I received an Annual Traffic Report from WordPress.com. I recorded a video to demonstrate the wealth of information provided in:

WordPress Stats from the JetPack Plugin

Don't think that Technorati is just for small blogs, even the high traffic blogs are taking advantage of being listed in this powerful blog directory. The Huffington Post, Mashable, The Verge, and many other leading blogs have claimed their listing and so should you!

Here's a screenshot of the top five blogs!

Did you claim your blog with Technorati yet? Let me know in the comments below!

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My All Time Favorite Tip for Getting Blog Traffic

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In this episode I talk about how you can get more blog traffic by paying attention to the information found in Google Analytics.

Getting Traffic

We always communicate with our readers on blog comments, Twitter, Facebook and even through email responses to our newsletters. Even though these readers are extremely important and they represent our core group of followers, there is another group that we need to listen to as well.

The only way to understand what this "silent" group of readers is trying to tell us is by looking at our tracking statistics. There are a lot of different software programs we can use to do tracking but I recommend using Google Analytics.

Analytics Integration with Webmaster Tools

Google Analytics can be integrated with so many other Google products and primarily I go into detail about the integration with Google Webmaster Tools. You can learn more about Google Webmaster Tools in a previous episode of the podcast and you can find watch this video tof find out how to make the connection between the two accounts.

How to Connect Google Webmaster Tools to Google Analytics 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVWtKoMA1gY

Once you connect the two account the Search Engine Optimization reports will help you find which posts on your blog are getting the most traffic from Google. This is really helpful for you determine how effective you are at getting search traffic for the terms you are going after. On the other hand, you'll also gain insights on what you might be doing wrong! But once you have that information you can put a positive spin in this by creating more content that people like. 

I share two examples of this from posts on my Basic Blog Tips blog and how I was able to turn this into a successful traffic generation tool for my blog.

Google Analytics and FeedBurner Integration

It's also a wonderful idea to allow FeedBurner to integrate with Google Analytics. I give an excellent example of how Justin Young from Major Money Tips http://www.majormoneytips.com/how-to-use-google-reader-find-and-share-content-553/ put this to good use on his blog.

This is how you can really listen to your readers and develop  more of the content they want to read about and more importantly, you can provide them with the content that they are searching for. This will help you get more traffic but also help your readers by giving them information that addresses a problem they are trying to solve or fulfills a need that they have. Eventually these "silent" readers will become part of you core group of commenters, followers and subscribers.

Happy blogging!

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10 Point Check List For Blog Promotion

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I call this the:

Blog Promotion Manifesto

Use this ten point blog promotion checklist to promote your pillar content on the internet.

You wrote a great post - Whats next?
In this episode you'll learn:

• How to drive traffic to the post
• How to get the post shared
• How to grow your network

#1: Choose a catchy "sharable" headline - What's a Shareable Headline? A shareable headline get attention? It also needs to be around 120 characters so that it fits easily into a retweet!

#2: Share the post on social networks, blogging communities and webmaster forums 
For Twitter use: JustRetweet and Viral Content Bee
For Facebook use: Social Buzz Club
Forums and Communities to join:

• Blog Engage 
• Triberr
• BizSugar 

#3: Add a link to the post in social networking profiles instead of your home page

#4. Blog Commenting - Leave "valuable" comments on CommentLuv enabled blogs. Here's some tips for leaving good comments that get approved:

• Offer good advice
• Share your take
• Ask a question

#5: Publish related content on your blog. Case studies are just one option!

#6: Guest Post on authority blogs that help build your Google "Author Rank". In order to do this, you must be sure the host blog provides you with an author bio box so you can get your Google Authorship!

#7: Reproduce your content as a video, presentation or podcast! Get creative - Check out the slides and video for this post below.

#8: Conduct interviews with bloggers who have expertise on the subject of your blog post.

#9: Build links to your post with content curation platforms like Scoop.it, Paper.li or Storify

#10: Send an email to your newsletter subscribers
Don't miss an episode - subscribe to my podcast The Anchor Show

If you are new to blogging be sure to check out Blogging Tips 101 and to get free tips and resources to help you build a better blog and expand your audience! http://BasicBlogTips.com/email

The Blog Promotion Manifesto:
Your 10 Point Check List for Blog Post Promotion from Ileane Smith

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Time For Your Transformation from Blogger to Webmaster

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Ready to transform from being a blogger into being a Webmaster? 

I bet you’re wondering how you’re going to do that. 
First, let's take a look at where we started. In the episode titled Start Your Blogging Journey Today, we talked about how to decide on a blog topic and how to pick a domain name for your blog. Next we focused on the importance making connections and collaborations with other bloggers.
In this next phase of your blogging journey you are going to dig deeper and gain a better understanding of the traffic that is coming to your blog.

Enter Google Webmaster Tools 

If you haven’t submitted your blog to Google’s index yet, the best way to do that is by submitting a sitemap of your blog to Google Webmaster Tools. 
It might sound super geeky to do this but it’s really not all that technical. 
Most WordPress blog themes have this feature built in already or you can install a plugin like the XML Sitemap plugin.  

Once your site is included in Google’s index, you should also verify your site with Bing Webmaster Tools as well, so that your blog is included in their index also. 

Search Queries in  Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools will "teach" you several lessons about the performance of your site and help you evaluate how effective you are at attracting website visitors. 

Go to the Traffic section of the report, click on Search Queries, and you'll find the following columns of data:

Queries: Number of search terms people are looking for

Impressions: Number of times your site shows up in Google's search results or SERP

Clicks: Number of times people saw your site in search and click through (also known as TRAFFIC!) 

Google Webmaster Tools versus Google Analytics 

There is a clear distinction between Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. 
Google Analytics - tells you about all the traffic you have coming to your blog. It tracks all of the traffic no matter what source it comes from. You can find out how many visitors come to your site from social media sites, links on other blogs, paid advertising promotions, other search engines, YouTube, etc. 

Analytics also tells you how long people stayed on the page, how many pages they visited and more. 

Webmaster Tools - provides details of your sites performance in Google’s index or in their search results pages. You can find the keywords or search terms that people are looking for that send traffic to your blog.  Connect Google Analytics to Webmaster tools

For more information about Google Analytics read Google Analytics Integrations: Centralizing Digital Marketing by Daniel Waisberg.

Monitoring Keywords That Send You Traffic

In the traffic report you can click on any column heading to sort by that item. For example, select the "Click" column and you'll see the top post on your blog that is getting "organic" traffic.  

Hopefully you will find that you are getting traffic based on something you want to get traffic for. Use this information to develop more content on the that topic. Go into more detail about the topic or approach it from a different point of view and be sure to interlink the new post with the old one to boost your rankings even higher. 

On the other hand, you might find that you're getting organic traffic for terms that is relevant to blog's topic but you don't have enough expertise to do a follow up post, see if you can get someone to do a guest post. 

CASE STUDY: In the podcast I joked about a post on my other blog Basic Blog Tips about The Benefit of Having an iPhone. That particular post ranked on page one of Google and sent tons of traffic to my blog. The problem was that I couldn't do a follow-up post myself because I don't have an iPhone. As fate would have it, turns out that one of my guest authors, Ahmed Raza has lots of expertise and knowledge in the area of mobile marketing. He wrote a follow up post called Ten Smartest iPhone Apps for Bloggers and now that post is getting all of the organic traffic from people searching for tips about using the iPhone. This is the ideal situation for me because Ahmed's post is much more relevant to my audience and the type of visitors that I want to attract - bloggers. These visitors will tend to stay on the blog and look at other articles versus traffic from the older post, who were people just looking for information about using iPhones. 

This is just one example of how you can use your new found "webmaster" skills to increase traffic and more importantly send the right signals to Google so they can send targeted traffic and potential clients and customers to your blog. 

I'd like to hear from you. Have you submitted your sitemap to Google? Did you connect your Analytics to your Google Webmaster account yet? 

Be sure to check out Google's Webmaster Academy.

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