The Six Signs of an Authoritative Blog
Jan 24th
By Obaidul Haque, {grow} community member
For many reasons, blogging remains one of the most important components in a search and social media marketing strategy. And to be successful, you not only have to strive to establish your own distinctive blogging voice, but also create guest posts for powerful blogs, especially as you’re starting out.
Identifying authoritative bloggers may be an essential way to grow your audience and promote your business.
How do you identify the best, the most popular, the most authoritative, blogs to connect with? Well, you can’t judge a blog by its cover … or its design, or its author, or even the subject matter. Let’s look at a strategy to determine how authoritative a blog really is.
The Importance of Authoritative Blogs
To get the maximum out of your guest blogging efforts, you should select blogs with a good search engine score and a favorable reputation among the target audience. Since you spend so much time on researching and writing content for guest posting, it’s your duty to make sure that your crafted content finds an appropriate home.
By getting your content (guest article) placed on authoritative blogs, you not only build high quality backlinks the natural way, but you also obtain an excellent opportunity to gain exposure globally, reach out to a new audience and attract traffic to your company website or blog. It can be fun and rewarding. What more could you ask for?
A delicate balance
As an SEO professional, I know what a nightmare a search penalty can prove to be. I understand what ‘unnatural link warnings’ from Google mean and how one single update can send an entire website or blog straight to hell, while jeopardizing the sheer existence of your online business too.
Cranking out articles one after another and submitting them to several blogs at random to quickly build tons of links overnight is not guest blogging. That’s spam! If you are taking to guest posting that way, brace yourself for problems!
So now that we’ve established that, let’s look at the six vital signs of authoritative blogs:
1) Freshness – The very first sign to look for is the frequency of publishing. If a blog shows a lack of updates, it’s not only bad from SEO point of view but it also signals disinterest from the blog owner. Usually, blogs with good search engine authority are very regular and frequent with their posting schedule.
2) Published Guest Writers – If it’s an authoritative blog, it’s not going to allow just anyone to publish a guest post on their site. Take a look at some of the previously posted guest articles and check out the bio section. It will help you know the quality of published guest authors and the kind of links included.
3) Blog Stats – Before you look for anything else, you need to check out the stats of the blog you want to place your guest post on. To do that, you don’t need access to the Google Analytics account of that blog (that’s impossible unless you are an IT genius, LOL). Not to worry, there are several tools that you can use to gauge the authority of a blog. Alexa.com and Compete.com are good examples.
4) Google PageRank – This is, in fact, a part of the blog’s stats. A handsome Google PR indicates good search engine authority. But bear in mind – ‘All authoritative blogs can have high PR, but all high PR blogs can’t be authoritative.’ Look for the other signs to be sure whether a blog is really authoritative.
5) Number of Comments – Authority is not just about numbers or stats. It’s also about the degree of reader engagement. So, you can simply take a quick look at some of the guest articles published on the host blog and check out the number of responses or comments each of them have garnered. A high number of posted comments as well as their replies by the author is definitely a good sign of high reader engagement. It ensures a great guest blogging ROI.
6) Social Shares – Authoritative blogs also have good social media influence. Before you decide to publish a guest article to your chosen blog, make sure it has a solid social media presence so that your guest post can receive maximum exposure.
Do you have more tips (or signs) that guest bloggers can use to identify authoritative blogs? Please let me know.
Obaidul Haque is an SEO professional, freelance writer, passionate blogger and the owner of HelloBloggerz.com. He works with a wide range of clients from across the globe and helps them expand the online reach of their businesses. He can be reached via Google+ or Twitter.
The Native Advertising Trend: Hot or Hoax?
Jan 23rd
By Neicole Crepeau, Contributing {grow} Columnist
Native advertising. It’s all the buzz. Marketers are enthralled with it, and studies suggest spending on native advertising will increase significantly in 2013. Let’s take a reality check of this big trend.
Why all the excitement?
Traditional ads that display on blogs and publisher’s sites are easy to spot. That’s led to what advertisers call “ad blindness,” the tendency for readers to ignore ad blocks on websites. Native advertising helps counter ad blindness by embedding the advertising into the site more subtly.
Definitions vary, but in general, native advertising is content presented in a way that closely fits the tone and style of the online publication where it is shown. Facebook’s sponsored posts and Buzzfeed’s presented-by stories are oft-cited examples. Native advertising goes beyond this, though.
Native advertising blurs the lines between paid and earned content, and it’s creeping into the blogosphere as well. More successful bloggers are accepting payment for posts and links, and establishing all manner of sponsorships and partnerships whereby they promote and write about companies and products for pay. Most of the bloggers I know appear to be responsible and are following the FTC disclosure rules. However, since those rules aren’t well enforced, it’s unclear how many bloggers and publishers aren’t giving disclosures.
The opportunity for bloggers
As a blogger, I’ve been approached in the last year with several native advertising/sponsored content opportunities. They ranged in form. Some would have me produce the content, usually as an article that looks much like the publisher’s content except for my bio at the end. I would then pay to have it hosted on the publisher’s site, with links to the content embedded on the publisher’s site in such a way that they look like links to the publisher’s own content.
In other cases, the opportunity was to jointly-develop content development/presentations, such as joint webinars along with white papers I’d produce. I would pay for run-of-network promotion.
In yet other cases, I’d pay for advertising or a white paper promotion, but as part of the package, I’d also provide information to the publisher about a product or topic. The publisher’s own writers would then write and publish an article on my product/topic. I was told that this was done to keep the content “unbiased” and accurate — but since I would be paying the publisher, how unbiased could it really be?
You can see how fuzzy the lines are getting. As the amount of native advertising and sponsored content rises, we’ll witness more complex and blurred business relationships between bloggers/publisher and advertisers.
So what’s the problem? Trust.
We all want to see our favorite bloggers find a way to earn a living from their content. And, as I said, many of these bloggers are putting the requisite disclosure in their promotional posts.
Yet … even though I know they are disclosing relationships, I suddenly find myself skeptical of any mention of a product on those blogs, especially if there’s a link to the product site. Now that I know these bloggers are earning money by promoting businesses through their content, I can’t help but be suspicious of any blog post that turns into an advertisement.
I expect I’m not alone.
Consumers avoid ads. There’s no reason to believe they won’t be able to see through native advertising on blogs and avoid these blogs, too.
So, given that advertisers will jump on and drive the native/sponsored content wave, and that consumers will inevitably see through the trickery, what does it mean for the long-term future of native advertising and sponsored content? I can see several possibilities:
- Native/sponsored content becomes less effective. That’s pretty much a given. As consumers become familiar with the new native advertising territory, they will be less likely to click on the content (except perhaps for content like Buzzfeed’s that is purely entertainment with branding).
- Consumers abandon bloggers/publishers that are clearly being paid. Bloggers/publishers invest in building a following, which is what enables them to monetize. Yet, it’s the regular readers who will most easily spot the monetary influence. (A first-time visitor to a site may not as easily distinguish paid versus unpaid content, when advertisers and publishers are working hard to hide it.) As the regular readers become less trustful of the blogger/publisher because money is now clearly in the picture, they may abandon the site. That would create a real Catch-22 for bloggers who become successful by building a following, but need to make a living from their blog.
- Smaller and independent bloggers/publishers are favored by readers. Readers will probably begin to show a preference for smaller bloggers and publishers who are keeping it clean. Similarly, business blogs (sites that are creating content solely for the purpose of promoting their own business and not taking money from other businesses) may be considered better sources of information. Sure, they have a bias, but they have only one bias (promoting their business) and it’s easy for a reader to account for.
- People become more willing to pay for content. With the increased gaming of review sites and an increased mistrust of “free” content, users may prefer to pay for content from journalist and analysts. Especially when researching large purchases.
- Google works against native advertisers. How is Google making money on native advertising on publisher sites? They’re not. Native advertising is an alternative to AdWords, and currently it’s mostly a direct publisher-to-advertiser play. Anything that threatens Google’s ad revenue is likely to become a target for Google. Given the Panda update which focused on ensuring high-quality content, and the fact that native advertising siphons money from Google, it’s likely that Google will adapt its algorithm to penalize bloggers and publishers using native advertising or sponsored content. Or, the company may find a way to enable native advertising through its network.
I don’t know exactly where we’ll end up, but I’m sure that native advertising won’t be a panacea for advertisers. The web is an ecosystem. When a new element, such as a new ad format, is introduced users adapt to it and change their behavior. In this case, the likely change is one of mistrust, which will undermine the native advertising/sponsored content monetization strategy in the long run.
Are you starting to see any of this cropping up in your web reading? What impact is it having on you?
Neicole Crepeau is the Senior Marketing Manager at Vizit Corporation, and blogs at Coherent Social Media. She’s the creator of CurateXpress, a content curation tool. Connect with Neicole on Twitter at @neicolec
Illustration courtesy BigStock,com
The best advice I ever received for my business, and my blog
Jan 22nd
I was recently asked by an interviewer, “Who has had the greatest influence on your personal growth?” Pretty good question! But the answer was easy. In fact, there was one lesson I learned from one man that has had a profound impact on my approach to life, my business, and my blog. I’ll share that important lesson with you today.
Sensei and sensibility
When I lived in Los Angeles, I desperately wanted to attend the MBA program at Claremont Graduate University for one reason – Peter Drucker taught there (in fact, the school was named for him). If you have never heard of Peter Drucker, discovering his books and articles might be the most important thing you can do for your career.
I applied for entry to the college, but was told I was too young to be accepted to this prestigious program. I would not quit that easily, however, and went through an appeal process, arguing that they needed my youth (27 at the time) to add to the diversity of the program! I made an unlikely stand on the grounds of EEO, which was quite a stretch, but incredibly, I was admitted! Perhaps my tenacity amused them.
Peter Drucker was one of the handful of people I have known who could distill vast complexity into simple wisdom. The scope of his knowledge was breathtaking. He would sit on the edge of his desk and lecture for three hours straight without a break, and without notes. He generally lectured about one of his books. My favorite was Innovation and Entrepreneurship
A new approach to leadership
Professor Drucker taught via the Harvard case study method. We would be assigned to read a long, detailed, real-life business case and then dissect it in class to discover the true nature of how business worked.
The students in this class were high-flyers — the brightest business executives in the Los Angeles region — and they were always trying to “solve” the business case. Nothing made Professor Drucker angrier than that! “What makes you think you are smarter than the people in the case?” he would ask, “Smarter than people who have worked in this industry for decades? How can you be that arrogant?
“Your job as a business leader is not to provide the right answers. It is to provide the right questions.”
Over and over he would pound this truth into our heads until it became part of our DNA. And he was so right … so profoundly right. There is not a week that goes by that I don;t think of some lesson from Professor Drucker, but this was the most important of all.
Think of the power of leading people to the most effective solution, not by pontificating and telling them what to do, but by distilling the issue down to the essential question and letting them discover the answer themselves.
Adopting a strategy of professional humility is anathema to our modern Western culture. We may associate humility with weakness, when in fact it is strength.
The essence of blogging?
Like most young people starting out in business, I felt a need to know all the answers, especially when I was promoted to a leadership position. But from Professor Drucker I learned that being vulnerable, involving others in the process, coming up with a better solution together, sharing the weight of decisions – those are all benefits of humility. Being deeply human, instead of trying to wear the Superman cape, is powerful and liberating.
This is also a key to effective blogging I think. Most bloggers adopt a mantle of invincibility and that is certainly the easy path to take: “I publish, therefor I’m correct.”
But being a humble blogger leads to meaningful social media engagement and ultimately, crowd-sourced wisdom. I almost never have the answers. But I think my blog posts do present the essential questions: Does every business need a social media strategy? What is the value of social media engagement? How do we measure success?
And then YOU provide the answers through your comments. A much better system, don’t you think? How could I possibly sustain this blog for the last four years by only giving you answers? Nobody is that smart.
I hope this resonates with you in some small way. How does this idea land on you? Could being a humble leader become a key to making you a better leader, a better parent, a better blogger?
Photograph courtesy Claremont Graduate University
Link to Innovation and Entrepreneurship is an affiliate link.
The insider’s guide to social media consulting success
Jan 20th
When I have been asked for a proposal to create a social media marketing strategy for a company, I have won the business 95 percent of the time. That may seem remarkable but I’ve found there is one simple secret to connecting with companies at this early stage of engagement.
Competing agencies typically try to impress by piecing together glossy, elaborate plans spanning from Facebook promotions to blasting out a Pinterest campaign.
I do no such thing. In fact, I put together no plan at all. I simply, and truthfully, tell the client that I don’t know what they need. And neither do they. We need to start with a foundational strategy (not an action plan) that is aligned with the company’s goals, and even more important, aligned with the company’s CULTURE.
This is the difference between creating a glimmering strategy that crashes and burns on take-off, and a realistic strategy that can actually be accomplished and change the company.
In every organization there are five common hurdles to social media success. A critical step in the strategy development process is to provide a painfully honest assessment of these factors and the company’s ability to execute and sustain a social media marketing initiative. That is where the consulting process should begin — not picking out the colors for the Facebook page!
Assessing the social media “engine”
Here are the five critical components I assess before even thinking about creating a social media plan:
Budget and resources — Is the company willing to commit the proper financial and human resources to execute the right way, or are they just checking a box to create an image? Do they seem committed to adopting “digital” as a business philosophy? How will they make this transformation?
Technology — I look at this very broadly. Is this a tech-savvy company eager to embrace new platforms or are they stuck in the 1990s? Are they fast and flexible, or ponderous in their approach to development? Have they erected security firewalls that will jeopardize success? Is the IT department a fortress resisting change or an agent propelling progress?
ROI and measurement — Does the company have a realistic view of the social media opportunity, or are they looking for immediate gratification? Are they willing to consider qualitative, as well as quantitative, measures of success? Do they even have measurement processes in place that we can build upon? Are they looking at this as a band-aid or a long-term strategy?
Legal — Can the Legal Department adjust to the new demands of the social web? Are they willing to push accountability down through the organization or will they have to approve every tweet? Are they also willing to make the cultural adjustment necessary or will they “review” an initiative into oblivion?
Corporate culture/leadership — I mention this last, but it is not the least. In fact, it is most important of all. A corporate culture is very complex but is largely determined by the leadership of the organization. If the leadership does not understand, embrace, and become actively involved in the change, a social media initiative will never move past checking a box. There is no such thing as a grassroots cultural change in a company> The leader has to be actively on board. Is the company culture customer-centric? Conservative? Slow to change? Nimble?
Now what?
Once you do this analysis, what do you do with it?
Creating an actionable and sustainable social media initiative requires all five of these building blocks to be in place. Think of these elements as integral parts of an engine. If even one part is not working, the car may start quickly, limp along for awhile, but ultimately sputter and stop.
So the strategy must be created in the context of the political reality of the company. Perhaps the first step toward social media success is not starting a blog or Facebook page, but hosting a series of social media workshops to get everybody on the same page. Or maybe it’s one-on-one counseling with a leader, or creating an internal social media council.
Strategy doesn’t start with a Facebook page, it begins (and perhaps ends) with corporate culture. Agree? Do you see these landmines and opportunities at your companies too?
Welcome to {grow}
You’re in marketing for one reason: Grow.
Grow your company, reputation, customers, impact, profits. Grow yourself. This is a community that will help. It will stretch your mind, connect you to fascinating people, and provide some fun along the way. I am so glad you’re here.
-Mark SchaeferFollow Mark
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