Voice is one of the most important elements of a successful blog. Period.

Without voice, new arrivals to your blog won’t read beyond the first paragraph.

Give your readers a strong voice, though, and they won’t be able to keep their hot little fingers off that RSS button.

But what is voice, exactly? And how can you make it come through in your blog?

You probably think of people you know as having a deep voice, or a squeaky voice, or a soft voice. Obviously no one can literally hear you on your blog, but they can “hear” you through the words you use and the way you use them.

Chances are, your 8th grade English teachers didn’t teach you about voice. I don’t blame them. It’s messy, abstract, and darned difficult, and I should know. I’ve taught nearly 800 young teenagers the magic of voice over the past nine years.

And now I’m going to teach you.

1. Get into the flow

Each day, my students do a three-minute writing warm-up. The only goal is fluency — to produce as much writing as they can in three minutes.

Some of the best writing they ever produce comes from these three-minute bursts. By removing the pressure of quality and focusing purely on quantity, the students are free to flow. What comes out is natural, quirky, and authentic. What comes out has voice.

Try it: Set a timer and go. Don’t let the pencil come off the paper (or your fingers come off the keyboard). Just produce. Don’t edit. Don’t censor. Simply flow.

2. Write like you talk

I encourage my students to read their writing aloud and ask themselves or a peer, “Does this sound like me?” If the answer is no, I challenge them to simply talk about the subject in their compositions for a moment, while I jot down some of the words and phrases they use in their ramblings. When they insert some of these snippets into their writing — BAM — voice happens.

Try it: Record yourself talking through an idea for a blog post — then transcribe what you’ve written. You’ll find some super-rich voice nuggets.

3. Forget conventions (at least at first)

Many of my students have been taught by previous teachers to stifle their voices by writing “standard” English. (Whatever that means.)

Yes, writing must communicate a message, and to that end the conventions of standard English are important. But in many instances, those rules actually hinder our ability to create a realistic voice.

I frequently remind my students that the rules of our language evolved over time with the specific purpose of creating clarity. If breaking a rule will enhance the clarity of their writing, then they should break it — and so should you.

That may mean you choose a fragment over a complete sentence, end a sentence with a preposition, or add a comma when the rule book says it isn’t needed. These deliberate choices allow your voice to shine through.

Try it: The next time you write a first draft, throw a few conventions out the window. Pretend they don’t exist. When you reread your draft, make your editing decisions based on what best communicates your message.

4. Write what you know

This is a biggie. For years, I have asked my students to write an essay about who they would put on the face of a new coin.

The best papers, almost always, are written about their moms. Isn’t that sweet?

Other students write about Martin Luther King, Jr. or Michael Jordan, or Anne Frank. Sometimes those essays are great, but many times they just sound like a regurgitation of historical facts.

(Even worse, sometimes those facts are wrong: “Dr. King helped free the slaves by refusing to get off the bus with his sister, Rosa.”)

Bloggers fall into the same trap of picking topics that sound smart or seem popular, even if those topics aren’t really near and dear to their hearts. The result: no voice.

Try it: Make this quote from Dolly Parton your new blogging mantra: “Figure who you are; then do it on purpose.” Strive for authenticity instead of popularity. Don’t try to sound like anyone or anything except who you already are. It sure works for Dolly.

What tricks do you have for finding your voice? Share your best methods in the comments. I promise not to assign grades!

About the Author: Joy Tanksley is a middle school English teacher, the wife of a philosopher, and a leader of workshops for women who want to smash limiting belief systems and lead more abundant lives. She blogs about living a joy-filled life at Being Joy.

Guest Post by Adriana Copaceanu

Before you start any marketing for your home business these days, you need to do your keyword research. And while there is a lot of information about keyword research, many still struggle choosing the right way or the right tool to find profitable keywords.

First of all, let’s remember that while it’s important to do your keyword analysis, it’s more important to take action! No amount of keywords will help you grow your business if all you do is keyword research…

With that said, today we’ll see how we can use Shopping.com to enhance our quest to find the right keywords and phrases for a specific niche. We all know and use the free WordTracker & Google keyword tools, and those are great, but there are other ways to see your niche from a different view.

Shopping.com is a great place to research physical product keywords. Let’s walk through how you go about finding your key phrases. Once you are at the Shopping.com site, click on the “See all” link on the top navigation. As soon as you do that, you’ll be taken to a list of the products sold at this site (as seen in the image here).

Let’s say we are looking for knitting keywords: we click on the link that says “Craft Supplies”. On the next page you’ll see “Knitting and Crocheting Type” with several categories specific to knitting, and if you scroll a little bit you’ll see a subtitle for “Craft Supply Type” with a link going to “Knitting and Crocheting”. All those are starting points for keyword research: those are things that people buy now.

And if you want to dig deeper, you can do that. Click on the link that says “Yarn” and on the next page, at the top, you’ll see some very specific key phrases that have lots of searches.

Now go to the free WordTracker keyword tool and see how many times these key phrases are searched for. I did just a small sample for you here.

• caron simply soft yarn 82
• sock yarn 187
• red heart super saver yarn 32
• ribbon yarn 46
• bulky yarn 37

Of course, don’t stop there. As you search these keywords on WT, you’ll see many more variations for your new found keyword phrases. The possibilities are endless, and all you need to do once you finish your keyword research is to start using them: write some articles for your blog, some for distribution, check some of your older posts and add tags to them, create a Squidoo page, a Hub page, etc.

–>Affiliate marketer Adriana Copaceanu has been successfully marketing online since 2004, and recently decided to share her Online Business Journey She loves doing keyword research so much she offers some up for free on her blog every Friday.

Link building strategies aren’t just for SEO. The true purpose of building links is to market your content…

Your content may be a sales page, a product review, an article or tutorial with a strong call-to-action, or even a blog post or article that links to one of those pieces of content.

Regardless of what type of content it is, you need inbound links to market that content. Those links are a means of communicating with your target market, and an open door inviting them to view your content.

It’s too easy to get caught up in the mechanics of web content development and seo, and forget the true purpose – and the human element…

When we research keywords, we see search volume and profit potential. But behind those phrases are real people with real needs, typing those phrases into their favorite search engine. Someone’s mom, brother, or daughter. Maybe even yours.

Connecting with that image will help you frame your content, and your links in the best possible way. A way that answers their question, or offers them the solution they’re searching for. It will help you communicate with them more effectively.

Creating content isn’t a business. SEO isn’t marketing. These are simply tools to achieve your real objective: to reach and interact with your market on the internet.

Get your ideal visitor in mind. Are they a certain age? A specific gender? What do they need or want? What ways do they use to research and find that?

How can you best serve them?

Keeping these things in the forefront of your mind as you work on your business will bring you the success that you’re looking for.

It’s not about using all the right plugins, all the right link building strategies, or writing with an exact word count in mind. It’s not about on-page and off-page factors, or search algorithms. It’s about the people that surf and search.

Twitter is a good micro-example. You can set up auto-tweets to push your content out to Twitter, you can pull your tweets into web pages, you can automatically follow and unfollow people by the masses. There are all kinds of plugins and programs and tips and guides…

But unless you are out there actually having a two-way conversation with your target market (and their mother, and their friends), all that pushing and pulling is going to get you nowhere. Social properties aren’t just for inbound links, they’re an opportunity to interact with your ideal visitors and your potential buyers.

The same can be said for link building strategies. It doesn’t matter if you know the algorithms down to an exact science. If your links don’t ’speak’ to the reader in the right way, or if your content doesn’t open and close the conversation they are having in their mind, your conversion rate is going to tank.

Meet them where they are (find out where they are and place your links strategically). Engage them by addressing the thoughts and questions they already have (with well-written content that matches the intent of their search).

Lead them to a solution (with a strong call-to-action). Then keep that conversation going, even after the sale, by following up and continuing to address any ongoing needs they may have (via your customer list or autoresponder).

Your inbound links and your content aren’t just for search engines. Your customer isn’t just a sale. Put the human element into your marketing, and your link building strategies, to really make it work – both for you, and for them.

Best,

A note from the inbox…

Hi Lynn,

I was reading your article on choosing long tail keywords & phrases. I wanted to let you know that my company, wordstream, released a free long tail keyword tool (it’s totally free). So for example, in your article, you use the word “bass guitar” – the wordstream keyword tool generates a list of around 12,000 keywords: http://www.wordstream.com/keywords/?pattern=bass+guitar
Anyway, just wanted to pass that along. Thanks!

Larry Kim
Founder, VP of Products
WordStream, Inc.

Thank you, Larry!

This is actually a fun brainstorming / research tool to search keywords. I gave it a whirl and I really like the web-based interface and the features they offer.

A search for ‘marketing’ returned 678,471 related keywords:
http://www.wordstream.com/keywords/?pattern=marketing

This is great for brainstorming longtail and related phrases. They have a variety of tools for keyword discovery, keyword analytics, keyword organization, etc.

Check it out

Best,

When you first install WordPress and set up your blog, writing that first post can be a bit intimidating.

What do I write?
Where do I start?

The key of course is to get started…

Three times in the last week I’ve had opportunity to show off my very first blog post. It was a little over 5 years ago, in August 2004, on the blogger.com platform.

I’ll show that to you as well, for a bit of a laugh:

That was me figuring out how to post to my blog for the first time, of course. And later, when I switched over to WordPress in March 2006 I started fresh (instead of importing my blogger content). And again, a first post there (um, here):

So there you have it – two of my very first blog posts, on separate blogs. And both pretty lame, no doubt -heh. Take note of the lack of comments on that first one. That’s right, no comments in over 5 years.

Sure I could delete either or both of those posts, as they were simply me testing the theme and checking things out. But I didn’t, and they are still floating around out there, so I thought it might serve as a little inspiration for you… Because I’m quite sure you can do better than that!

So if you’re still struggling with where to start, or what to post first on a brand new blog… don’t. Just start – anywhere. And remember: you can always delete or edit.

Of course, I’ve started a number of new blogs since then – and 2 more just this week, in fact. I have a better starting point strategy now than I did a few years ago, so I’ll share with you were I generally start…

First, I walk through my own checklist:
How to Start a WordPress Blog

Next I do a bit of keyword research and choose my keywords & phrases. Once the blog is set up and the theme is installed (see checklist), I set up my categories. Then I take my keywords & phrases (see last link) and create drafts for blog posts in each category that I created.

I don’t actually publish these posts yet, or put any pressure on myself to sit down and write “great blog posts”. I just create drafts with the keyword phrase in the post title and any notes on the topic in the content area, then save.

Once I do this for my list of keyword phrases, and have a whole list of drafts, I go back and use my blog post outline to flesh each one out into a nice blog post. Then I publish each post as it’s ready.

If I can sit down over a weekend and knock out 10 or 20 posts (or more), I queue them to drip out over time. You can do that using the post-dating feature for publishing in WordPress.

So there you have it – a great starting point for your brand new blog!

And if you use this method, you’ll never be sitting there looking at a blank screen. You’ll always have a selection of drafts to work with. Hopefully that will keep you from publishing silly posts like my two above (ha!). By the way, I have 524 posts in draft here at ClickNewz as we speak…

Best,

p.s. There are great courses specifically for WordPress – AffiliateTheme offers great training and help with their WP themes for affiliate marketers, for example. And Beginning Blogger walks you through learning to install, setup & customize WordPress.

I also do a lot of outsourcing. Paul Short has done most of the custom design and added features that you see here at ClickNewz. If you need ANY WordPress help check out his page at http://wp-guy.com.

Sorry I have been remiss in updating too much, I have been redesigning this blog and it is taking a lot of time as I am not a blog or web designer, and right now I REALLY HATE CODE! By the way I finally figured out how to redesign a blog behind the scenes so stay tuned for that tutorial!

Anyway, here is my take on how to rank for high competition keywords, sort of a follow up to higher search engine ranks with proper keyword research, but on a positive note.

Ultimately the best keywords are those that have lots of competition, often in the millions, because those are the ones that are searched for the most, cause and effect people! It is very difficult to rank for those keywords, but there is a way.

When doing keyword research there are always long tail keywords. A long tail keyword is simply a phrase with the main keyword in it.

Example:

Main keyword: Computers

Long Tail: Buy Cheap Computers

Now, if you look at the competition for most any popular main keywords it is usually very high, keywords like, money, credit cards, loans, mortgage, insurance, health, cell phones, computers, laptops, cars, the list can go on and on. Ranking for these keywords is going to be a long hard road. So, what you need to do is target the long tails for them and rank for those.

Let’s say I want to rank for cell phones, which has 2,700,000 competing sites with allintitle search query. So, I will find a couple of good long tails that still have a good amount of searches and much less competition, for example, cheap cell phones (15,000 competing sites) and buy cell phones (8,910 competing sites).

Now I build my links with those phrases in the anchor text and over time my site will rank for those long tails, but because the main keyword cell phones is in those longtails I will inadvertently begin to climb in the SERPS for cell phones, and depending on the link building efforts and the quality of the backlinks will get there sooner or later. Make sense?

You can do this over and over again with any keywords, but again I always check Page 1 of the results, because there are some keywords that are just not worth it because too many big guns sit on Page 1, all though nothing is impossible , just takes more effort, experience and time.

Time is always key here, as for some of those main keywords it could take a while to rank, but, that is okay because the long tails I pick will get me decent traffic, sales, Adsense revenue and whatever else I am targeting in the meantime, and once I get to Page 1 for the main keywords, which usually have gizzillions of daily searches then it’s all golden and I’ll be laughing all the way to the bank.

If you love the content buy me a coffee.

Copyright 2009 JR’s Internet Marketing Strategies. This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only, if you are reading this on a website other than your feed reader then the copyright has been violated. Visit JR’s Internet Marketing Strategies for more great content.

Among SEO professionals, there isn’t always consensus on precisely which and to what degree site factors contribute or detract from rankings on Google because the factors actually vary by industry. There are indeed, a number of contentious issues: markup and content quality, use of title tags, site organization and even arguments that Google Analytics data factors in to site rankings. Not likely (yet), but certainly up for debate among SEO professionals.

However, there are some Google ranking factors that most professionals agree affect site positioning on Google SERPs. However, these are opinions, find out for yourself how these apply to projects you’re working on.

Recommended Steps to Improve Google Ranking

1. Use keywords in HTML title tags. Probably the most significant factor for a site regardless of the competitive landscape, the title tag must be consistent with content in the page for best results. The more keywords in your title, the less effective this factor, be judicious.

2. Create quality anchor text for inbound links. At one time, according to some SEO professionals, quality anchor text was an essential component of a well-ranked site. After all, this is the text the user opted to see by clicking a link on another site. Most SEOs still contend that quality anchor text is a highly significant, positive ranking factor. If not for spiders, for visitors clicking in as well. Obviously the text should be relevant to the destination page for best results; that’s where your on page optimization comes in to play.

3. Increase link popularity. Link popularity takes into account the number of inbound links present. Link authority has less relevance, though it is still a factor depending on the competitive landscape. Link popularity is based on a global count of links from all sites. However, quality links are still critical to creating site authority; authority means ranking for more phrases than you intentionally target.

4. Hang in there. The age of a site is an important positive weighting factor according to many SEO professionals. It’s certainly a reasonable assumption. Failed sites are dropped as soon as the hosting subscription ends. If a site has been around for 10 years, the owners must be dong something right, especially if link popularity is steady developed over the years. Unfortunately for site owners, there’s no way to speed up the aging process – except hanging in there.

5. Increase the popularity of internal links. These links direct visitors to helpful, related content. They’re important in providing visitors with a positive on-site experience. Search engines view on-site link popularity as a sign that visitors like what they see and want to learn more.

7. Build deep links. Deep links are relevant to the topicality of the target page or keyword. The relevance of these inbound links matters to a site’s Google ranking. However, please note point 3. The sheer number of inbound links is a factor as well. Quality deep links carry more weight and add credibility to a site.

8. Connect with sites selling to the same demographic. Create a number of links with sites within your topical community. This helps visitors further their searches – something Google likes very much.

9. Keep old links. Google looks for web stability. The older the link, the more trust it has. It indicates a happy relationship with the site owner linking in who recognizes the value of sending visitors off-site. Google watchers suggest a three to four month time window for spiders to determine that this is a well-established, long-term link that has value to visitors of both sites.

10. Use keywords in body text. Make sure that keywords receive prominent display in headlines, headers, sub-heads. It’s important that the keywords used in HTML text on page match with keywords used in the site’s meta data and title tags.

Not Recommended

1. Don’t use session IDs in URLs. It sounds like a good idea on the surface, an easy way to track customer information, but here’s the problem. Each time a spider crawls the site, a new URL with session ID is created. The spider now has two, or three or more URLs all showing duplicate content. Go back to Go, do not collect $200. Don’t confuse this with pages that may have a couple GET variables in them; avoid that when you can, but just avoid having your pages containing session IDs.

2. Choose a reputable web host. The most potent negative ranking factor is server accessibility. If your server, located in Timbuktu, is inaccessible to spiders, it’s inaccessible to visitors. Down time soon becomes down and out time.

3. Avoid duplicate content. Googlebots employ filters to detect duplicate content. Now, if you opt to post some syndicated articles, you’re providing a service to visitors. However, a bot will recognize that content (it’s already appeared on 400 sites) and you’ll see a drop in traffic rank.

4. Jettison low-quality links. Google assesses the character of your site by the company you keep so keep good company by unlinking from (1) links farms, (2) sites with absolutely no quality content and (3) otherwise low-quality sites; e.g. FFA (free for all) sites.

5. Avoid any kind of links deception. Googlebots aren’t smart, but they can detect some paid links and a variety of links scams, including generated links. If a Googlebot suspects links fraud, your site may be penalized and sent to the basement or banned altogether.

6. Avoid a log-in before visitors and bots access “the good stuff.” Log-ins can easily confuse a bot who won’t be able to access quality content hidden behind a log in. Even though users with Google toolbars will be unknowingly suggesting new URLs to be crawled as they surf about, having teasers for the content your monetizing by subscription will help your SEO.

7. Avoid using frames. Horizontal and vertical framesets <frameset> are commonly used by designers to present more than one page of a site on the screen at the same time. However, frames are also bot traps. They can get in but they can’t get out, making it impossible for them to index a site – at all! Tell your developer to look at using iframes if possible or absolutely necessary.

8. Avoid duplicate title/meta tags. Title/meta tags are a valuable resource for site owners to expand access points to a site. Using title tags ensures that more pages are indexed and listed in Google’s SERPs as distinct links. All good. Unfortunately, too many duplicate title tags on pages in which the content topic hasn’t changed, is redundant and a waste of the bots time. Use tag your pages uniquely and judiciously.

9. Do not keyword stuff. Even though search engines no longer give much weight to keyword tags, keyword stuffing continues. Select 20 to 30 keywords – top-tier and long-tail – and focus on them. Keep keyword density in body text at no more than 3%. The old 5% rule still led to on-site gibberish – obviously these figures vary by competitive landscape.

10. Do not let quality slip – even for a day. Spiders crawl sites with greater frequency and sophistication and index updates are common as changes to a site are implemented. During periods of construction, be sure to keep spiders out of staging areas that have yet to be completed <nofollow> or block with robots. These works-in-progress may cost you points in the ranking sweepstakes.

Google controls 46% of all searches. Doesn’t it make sense to give this search engine exactly what it wants and delete what it doesn’t want?

Rhetorical question.

Social Media Marketing and Social Media Optimization are two new phrases that rose up last year to define marketing through social media and social networking sites. There seems to be a lot of confusion about what exactly they mean and what they define, which is bound to happen with any new phrase.

Social Media Optimization refers to the process of optimizing a website so that its awareness and content are easily dissemination through social mediums and online communities by users and visitors of the website. This can involve anything done “on-page” such as improving the design and usability of the website so that it becomes more compelling to users, in an effort to help them spread it through social media sites.

Social media marketing plays an active role in relation to social media by referring to the creation and distribution of content and other messages through the social web by some form of viral marketing. It can be anything from creating compelling content that gets bookmarked and even hits digg’s homepage to spreading a viral video by putting it on YouTube, facebook, and other social media websites.

This is all about the things that are done off-site, for example, participating in online communities where your clients hang out would be an active role that falls under Social Media Marketing.

In some or the other way the two remind me of the difference between push vs. pull marketing. In a way with Social media marketing you are actually pushing your message out there, but that’s usually where the pushing stops. A true viral marketing campaign is that where it spreads on its own and people actually want to spread it, so the push usually ends with the creation and initial “planting” of the campaign.

Social media optimization is all about pulling people in with an “optimized” site and encouraging users to spread your content without any effort on your part. I think the clear difference between the two is that Social media optimization refers to on-page optimization (on your website) while Social media marketing refers to those activities that take place outside of your website (on other websites). Social media optimization can be one of the ways to encourage Social media marketing activities by users and visitors of your website.