The best internal linking strategy takes planning. If you blog a lot, build an editorial calendar to

map out your blog posts for the week, month, or even the year. You’ll spot lots of opportunities for internal linking. By planning post topics in advance, you won’t forget about relevant posts you wrote months ago, and you can breathe new life into them with an internal link. Here are some tips on internal linking strategies you might not have thought about.

1. Don’t tell the whole story. Don’t give away the farm in every post. Instead, use early posts to build basic concepts, and expand on those concept in later posts, linking back to key points. Think of those internal linkbacks like a book or movie sequel, which spends some time in the first chapter or the beginning of the movie re-telling the back story.
2. Share related stories. Adding a “related stories” widget to your blog provides the perfect opportunity for internal links. When you work from an editorial calendar, you’ll have a good idea of what posts will show up in that list.
3. Don’t be afraid of outbound links. Outbound links encourage linkbacks from the blogs you linked to but, more importantly, they can help your blog post go viral. You can count on the blogger you linked to sharing your post with his network—and his readers may share it with their networks, and so it goes. If you believe in “content karma,” you can build your bank account with outbound links. But even if you don’t subscribe to “paying it forward,” generous outbound links are an effective internal linking strategy.

Dawn Allcot is a full-time freelance writer and blogger. She frequently writes about technology, business, parenting and paintball.

Image from dexter.lib.mi.us

It’s beginning to feel like every business is expected to give something away now.  The belief that offering something for free cheapens the overall brand has been all but abandoned in mainstream business practice. Companies like Starbucks have lured countless social media contacts into their stores by blasting the offer of “free iced coffee” down the social network airwaves.

But, wonder of wonders, providing a service for free isn’t always the most profitable way to go. Almost every publication has an online form with website content creation that overlaps with the printed version, a fact that no doubt contributed to the fall of so many magazines and newspapers in the last couple of years. Journalists are still in the process of damage control, scrambling to figure out a way to profit from their online readership. New York Magazine reported that on July 2^nd, the London Times put up a pay wall, but even with its well-established reputation and the incredibly minimal price tag, the transition from open to restricted has had its effect on traffic. In that same vein, some established bloggers have reverted back to subscription-only email newsletters, forgoing the freedom of information that characterizes the blogosphere in an attempt to reestablish the worth of their content.

So what is the verdict on giving it away? Many now-defunct newspapers began reproducing all of their printed content online before determining how to make a profit from it. However, any content marketing agency, by nature, is an advocate for providing quality content to develop and maintain relationships with consumers. But whatever you offer for free, it can’t be the entire substance of your service. That doesn’t mean that your free marketing content should be insubstantial fluff, far from it. Your content for blogs should be an asset to your readers.  It should establish your authority your ethos, even, and give your reader a sense that you are willing and able to help them (but that you still need to make a living).

Nicola Fairhead is an ideaLaunch editorial intern with a ferocious appetite for writing, editing, and consuming content.  She has quickly become a content marketing evangelist.

Image courtesy of http://blog.politiken.dk/klik/files/2009/10/free-sign.gif

If you are hiring writers to serve a diverse client base, your pool of writers should be equally diverse. Maybe Kate’s funny, conversational style has wide appeal, but what happens when a strictly professional client comes along and frowns upon her jokes? Or maybe Kate is a financial wizard who can write up a storm about stocks and bonds, but she’s baffled when it comes to French cuisine. You want writers of all backgrounds and voices—those who can win people’s hearts and those who can sell a product, those who know SEO content inside-out and those with a more creative bent.

So when the times comes to hire a freelance writer for your content marketing agency, don’t look for a clone of some other writer who has done good things for you in the past. Look for a fresh voice, a different background, a unique specialty, and before long, you should be able to find a perfect match for every client’s needs.

*Image from http://images5.cafepress.com/product/32322985v1_225×225_Front.jpg

Emily Robinson is a fiction writer and an editorial intern at ideaLaunch. After her final semester of college, she intends to become a copyeditor and/or a starving novelist.

1. Do your SEO homework. You can’t create newsworthy and relevant website content if you don’t know what is newsworthy and relevant. Take a look at the posts and news stories people are re-tweeting. What’s on the front page of Yahoo and other sites today? Once you find the top trends, use Google’s Keyword Tool to pinpoint the best search terms.
2. Find a unique slant. If the news story doesn’t relate to your industry, your article will sound like you’re just capitalizing on hot news trends to get hits. You may have to stretch to find the relevance, but with creative thinking, most stories can be slanted to any industry. For instance, on the anniversary of September 11, I wrote an article for a freelance writing site about how to cover disasters and death tactfully. A writer friend of mine employed SEO brilliance and cultural relevance when she wrote a blog post for a hair-products retailer about how hair has been used in the past to soak up oil spills, and government officials are contemplating this technique for the Gulf oil spill.
3. Hire a freelance writer. Freelance writers have a unique eye view on the world. They can keep up-to-date on search trends so you don’t have to. It’s their job to come up with original story ideas that are relevant to their clients’ target market. You can use our website content tips to do it yourself—or you can trust a professional to give you the SEO results you need.

Dawn Allcot is a full-time freelance writer and blogger. She frequently writes about technology, business, parenting and paintball.

Image from adelaide.edu.au

Each time, I design a pretty new blog and swear to myself that I’ll write something, anything, in my blog every single day. Then, of course, life happens. Work, responsibilities, having a social life all get in the way and my blog falls by the wayside. Now, in my case, no one really gets disappointed. Except of course for my mother, and the one reader I have somewhere in Iowa.

Now, I’m just one person. But if you’re running a business, following my inconsistent content model can spell disaster. Joe Pulizzi wrote an interesting post on Junta42’s content marketing blog last week that addressed a topic you don’t often see on the blog of a content marketing agency: 7 Reasons NOT to do Content Marketing. A lot of the reasons had to do with consistency. If you’re going to start producing content, you need to be committed to providing fresh, informative content on a regular basis, otherwise you look worse than you would if you never started. Furthermore, your content needs to original, relevant, and customer-focused (so stop talking about yourself so much, will you?).

Before you write one word, you need to know what the end goal of your content marketing effort is. Do you want to increase traffic? Improve conversion? Inform? All of the above? Tailor your strategy—you have a strategy, right?—to fit this end goal. And make sure everyone involved, even at the highest levels, is involved in the process and knows exactly how and why you are producing your content.

Maybe I should follow this advice for my personal blog. I wouldn’t want to disappoint mom.

Image from christthetruth.files.wordpress.com

Image from TVPartners.nl

User-generated content (UGC), also known as consumer-generated media, is any content—blog posts, videos, news, images, wikis, reviews, music, tweets—created by end-users and published on the web. It’s the two-way dialogue all over the web today, in contrast to the one-way media distribution system of the pre-Web 2.0 era, when content was created and distributed exclusively by journalists, editors and those who held the web-publishing reins. UGC is the digital democracy.

For the purpose of this blog post, I’m going to categorize UGC into two types: UGC on your own website and UGC on the greater web, published in forums, review sites, social media sites and beyond.

UGC on Your Own Website: Asset or Liability?

UGC is a great way to open the lines of communication between your customers and your company. When customers are empowered to share their thoughts, experiences and opinions on your website, your employees can immediately respond to their concerns.

UGC is a cost-effective market research tool that provides real-time data (good or bad). Furthermore, this free content boosts the SEO value of your website and therefore can increase traffic and potentially your bottom line.

Build UGC in as a part of your content marketing plan, and be sure to allocate staff to monitor the comments made on your website. These editors should verify that the content is relevant, delete offensive language/images and spam, and be aware of copyright infringement laws. Be sure that those who publish on your website agree to guidelines that state (among other rules) the content they publish is original. Here are some other legal ramifications to be aware of before embarking on your UGC plan.

While there are a few precautions to take when implementing a UGC strategy on your own site, the risks are worth the potential benefits.

UGC in the WWW: Know What People Are Saying about Your Brand

Not only should you monitor the UGC on your own site, but you should also know what people are saying about your brand all over the web—which brings us to the other kind of UGC.

UGC in this sense is a bit trickier because you don’t have the ability to delete something when you don’t own the site on which it appears. It’s a free country, and people will express their First Amendment rights to say whatever they want, from what they had for breakfast to how poor your customer service is or how your product is an over-priced dud. The internet amplifies that voice on an unprecedented scale. But don’t despair. Whether positive, negative or somewhere in between, knowing what people are saying about your brand, service or products can empower you to change that sentiment if it’s negative or capitalize on it if it’s positive.

Here are a few UGC-monitoring pointers courtesy of SEMPO Institute:

1. Compile a list of keywords to monitor. Include company name, names of products/services and names of certain employees and management. Think of every keyword variation possible.
2. Create RSS feeds for branded terms on Icerocket, Technorati, Google News, Yahoo! News and Bing News.
3. Compile all of these feeds into one reader, like Google Reader (which I use and love).
4. Set up free Google and Yahoo! alerts so that you get regular email notifications when something featuring these keywords is published online.
5. Consider hiring social media monitoring companies like Cymfony or Crimson Hexagon. Crimson Hexagon’s Opinion Analysis Platform is a tool that monitors what people are saying about a brand, product, market or the competition so that businesses can distill meaning beyond just “positive/negative” and take the appropriate action. This data also helps prove the ROI of online marketing initiatives.

Responding to Negative UGC

The worst thing you can do about negative UGC is to take the ostrich approach. We all know about Motringate in 2008 and the subsequent Motrin boycott—the company got an “F” in Social Media Monitoring 101 first because of their failure to listen to their target audience before running an insensitive ad, and second because of their inability to reply to the backlash in a timely manner. Here are a few steps you can take to minimize damage to your brand image.

If the claims are false:

1. Contact the website and ask them to kindly retract the statements. Use supporting facts.
2. Read the website’s rules for UGC; sometimes users don’t follow them. For example, have you heard of JobVent.com, a site where current and past employees can review their company? Do you know what former employees are saying about your business? If “venters” mention names of management in a negative context, you can contact the site and ask them to remove the offensive posts per the website’s guidelines.
3. If you get no response from the website, add a comment stating your company’s position. Be sure to support it with evidence.
4. Be proactive and publish a response on your website.

If the claims are true:

1. Add a comment or post to explain your side of the story. Even better if you can get a manager or C-suite representative to make the comment themselves, adding another layer of credibility.
2. Clearly state how your company plans on responding to the issue and take action. Offer a contact email address and or/telephone number so that people can get in touch with an associate trained to respond to the issue.
3. If you’re really in a pickle, do like BP and hire a professional reputation management company to do the dirty work.

Do you have a story to share about allowing UGC on your own site, or brand monitoring on the web? What are some of the lessons you’ve learned?

Have you ever wondered what makes sites like Amazon and Wikipedia so addictive? When you visit these sites, you can’t stop clicking; one link leads to another, and each page is more intriguing than the last. This is accomplished using a simple technique that you can mimic on your own website or blog: an effective internal linking strategy.

Think about it; in Wikipedia, practically every significant word or phrase in every article is linked to another article that deals exclusively with that subject. You might intend to read up on World War II and end up following a trail of links to an article about pirates or Romanian folklore. As far as website content tips go, leading your visitors deeper and deeper into your site—treating them to one wonder after another, like Alice as she tumbled down the rabbit hole—is at the top of the list.

Amazon takes this gem of content marketing even further; it recommends products to you based on those you have already looked at, lets you know what other people have ordered after viewing  those products, and provides you with lists of similar products—lists created not by Amazon itself as a marketing tool, but for fun and by customers like you. This strategy is based on a solid hypothesis: that if you happen to like one gothic romance, Marvel comic book, or young-adult urban-fantasy novel, you will like more of the same.

If you want to improve conversion, there is no better strategy than linking every page of your website to half a dozen other pages that tackle similar material from a fresh angle. Updates to one part of your site should be advertised on every other part, and it doesn’t hurt to have an interactive section where your customers can share their favorite products or services with visitors who are still on the fence.

Remember, interesting links keep your visitors clicking, and the more time they spend on your site, the more likely they are to find something they are willing to pay for. Internal links are also an integral part of search-engine optimization. If you want the best possible results, you can hire a marketing agency to help improve your internal linking strategy.

*Image from http://www.thecampussocialite.com/blog/images/alice-falling-down-rabbit-hole.jpg

Emily Robinson is a fiction writer and an editorial intern at ideaLaunch. After her final semester of college, she intends to become a copyeditor and/or a starving novelist.

In the world of blog marketing, people link to your content, not websites. Those few friends who read your blog are your most valuable asset, your first link to driving traffic inbound. Linking your existing social networks is the best way to employ this established group, but you’ll need to do some work on your end.

According to web information company Alexa, Facebook is the second most visited website in the world. Adding a ‘Like’ button to your posts is an unobtrusive way to promote your blog downstream to the networks of your friends. Having friends share your links in this way will bring a new audience to your site; it’s up to you to give the content to keep them coming back and, ideally, sharing your posts with their own networks.

Another quick and easy way to get the word out is to see who’s ‘Liking’ your content and engaging them. Saying thank you and promoting their site through your own network goes a long way in building a base of readership.

Two simple changes can help you steadily build a base of readership for your blog, but it’s up to you to offer them a reason to keep coming back!

Lou Perseghin lives in Providence, RI and works for a non-profit managing volunteers, recruiting members and handling marketing efforts.

Image from glamtings.files.wordpress.com

What makes Seth—and bloggers like Chris Brogan, J. Money, and others—stand out?

1. They aren’t afraid to be themselves. We’ve all read about the importance of transparency, but transparency is more than revealing a few secrets about what you do in your spare time. Your marketing content should be uniquely “you.” And yes, a good freelance writer can be “you” on your blog as well as you can (if not even better!). You don’t get much more transparent than these birthday videos from Chris Brogan in a recent post.
2. They are short but sometimes not-so-sweet. This ties in with Number One on this list. It’s okay to be brutally honest if that’s who you are. If you have something to say, get to the point. Skip the niceties.
3. They are truly original. We’ve all heard the expression, “There are no new ideas.” But guys like Seth Godin have a way of putting a new spin on old standards that makes their ideas feel new and revolutionary. If you want to keep people reading your marketing content, be different. (Or, as Seth says, “Be remarkable.”) Go crazy. Take chances.
4. They create marketing content that is easy to remember and easier to share. I never feel like I’m asking a favor of people if I suggest they read Seth’s blog. Instead, I feel like I’m doing something nice for them, because they’ll learn something important or, at the very least, walk away smiling.

Dawn Allcot is a full-time freelance writer and blogger. She frequently writes about technology, business, parenting and paintball.

Image from pharospartners.com

 

1. Pay attention to quality from the beginning. Curdled milk won’t taste sweet no matter how much chocolate syrup you pour into it, and content marketing won’t succeed if your content is nothing more than a couple of mediocre paragraphs stuffed with keywords. You should hire a freelance writer whose copy is polished, professional, and free of spelling and grammatical errors.
2. Quantity and quality go hand in hand. Too little syrup leaves a glass of chocolate milk pale and underwhelming, while too much just makes you sick. The same goes for SEO content. Hire writers who are able to strike the right balance, optimizing your content with a variety of keywords, but avoiding an overdose that would only leave readers distracted and annoyed.
3. Don’t forget to stir. SEO may be about marketing content, but you also want to improve conversion rates, and potential customers appreciate a company website or blog packed with well-crafted, relevant content, not random keywords. When you’re hiring writers,  find someone with a talent for mixing keywords into good content like chocolate syrup in a glass of milk, till the two are blended seamlessly. The final product is guaranteed to be both delicious and nutritious for your customers and your company.

Whimsical metaphors aside, the quality of the writing and the skillful use of keywords on your site or in your blog should be integral factors in your marketing strategy. If you want to achieve the best possible results, hire a content marketing agency with plenty of experience in blending these ingredients just the right way.

Image from http://preparednesspro.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/chocolatemilk.jpg

Emily Robinson is a fiction writer and an editorial intern at ideaLaunch. After her final semester of college, she intends to become a copyeditor and/or a starving novelist.