Some of the biggest names in blogging and social media are the biggest names because they have been working at it for awhile. Success didn’t happen overnight. The common threads among these top bloggers are structure and discipline. In What the Top 10 Blogs in Content Marketing Are Doing That You Probably Aren’t, we’re told to “Do as I Do and Not as I Say.” Instead of focusing on all the advice these top 10 blogs are giving us, we should focus more on the example they’re setting. For instance, one example this post gives is that “Readers have short attention spans. (The top blogs don’t care.)” These top blogs don’t follow conventional wisdom about keeping blogs short and to the point. The average word count in a top 10 blog post is 1,300 words.

How Many Experts are Required for a Successful Online Marketing Strategy? It’s actually a lot more than you may think. “Marketers seeking maximum results from online marketing require a full team with diverse skill sets.” Some of these skills are:

• Ad and PPC Manager
• Communicator
• Content Manager
• Designer
• Editor
• Programmer
• SEO Specialist
• Social Media Specialist
• And more!

Should you ask for re-tweets? Research shows that if you ask for a re-tweet, you’re much more likely to get one than if you don’t. Dan Zarella and David Meerman Scott recently filmed a conversation about this ongoing debate. Both sides of this debate bring up some great points, but can you really argue with research? Personally, I’m on the fence. I don’t do it. I find it to be, well, kind of lame. But I should probably give it a shot though.

What do you think? I’d love to hear our readers’ opinions on this.

Reasonably informed web-users, even newbies, no longer need to pay someone to build a website or to spend hours and days learning to do it themselves. With five free blogging platforms, all of them accessible to even the most inexperienced users, it’s never been easier for a hobbyist, power blogger or web entrepreneur to set up shop. They all offer basic features such as RSS buttons, an easy way to post images and more.

Blogger

Blogger is Google’s answer to a people’s blog platform. Popular among users who want a no-fuss, no-muss platform, it advertises that you can set up a blog with just three clicks. And it really is that easy. You can also add video and images with little trouble, and Blogger offers design options that allow you to customize the look. However, with Blogger, you cannot use your own domain name. All Blogger sites are part of one big continuum, so your domain name will look like this: MyBlog.blogspot.com., and at the top of every blog, there’s a button that allows readers to click off to the next blog on the continuum. Think of Blogger as a starter platform. It’s fun; it’s easy, and you can get your feet wet in an environment that’s about as unintimidating as it gets.

Posterous

Posterous makes life easy, indeed. The big thing with Posterous is time-saving—it does a lot of the work of blogging for you. When you send images, it does the resizing and embedding for you. It also embeds videos and documents. The site advertises, “Send us anything. We’ll make it look great.” Posterous offers dozens of themes, but they are all customizable, and you can also use a custom domain. Plus, it offers privacy options. Let friends make posts, or not. You can also control who reads your blog. When you make a new post, with its auto post feature, Posterous lets you cross-post to Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Linkedin and more than 20 other social media sites, making it perfect for networking.

Tumblr

Pithy is addictive. If what you want to do is post news updates, spiffy images, witty comments, audio or sage quotes from Ben Franklin, Tumblr is where it’s at. Four years old in 2011 and with more than 20 million blogs, Tumblr is beloved as a microbloggers’ platform.

Among Tumblr’s many features, its “People You Know” tool let’s you look up friends, much the way you would on Facebook. You can also use a custom domain and an original theme or choose from among hundreds of ready-made themes. Want tp set up a blog just for friends, family or coworkers? Tumblr let’s you do it. You can also use the privacy feature to make an occasional private post on an otherwise public blog. Plus, it has a feature that enables you to selectively let friends make entire posts, make comments or ask questions.

Tumblr’s iPhone app lets you publish from your phone, and for those who rely on the spoken word, forget podcasting. With Tumblr, you can call a dedicated phone number that allows you to make audio posts.

WordPress

WordPress.org has been around a long time and has a lively, helpful community. If you run into a glitch or wonder how to do some task, the community will answer questions. Often you don’t even have to ask the question, just search for it. Chances are someone already asked it and the answer is waiting for you. Aside from people who strictly blog, many users of WordPress.org blogs adapt it as a traditional-looking website, complete with shopping carts. You can choose from among hundreds of good-looking free themes or purchase custom themes. All of them are adaptable. Many themes look like traditional blogs, but others have a newspaper layout.

While WordPress.org is free, you will have to pay for hosting. WordPress.org does not host blogs or websites; it offers only the platform.

The newer WordPress.com is also free, but has more limited design options than WordPress.org, and you cannot place your own ads on it, which means you can’t make money from them. Also, like Blogger, you cannot use a dedicated domain name.

Moveable Type

If you want is a commercial-looking site that no one would guess is free, or if you plan to start small and grow, or if you’re already a big gun, power blogger, Moveable Type will suit your growing needs – and with little effort. It’s more than a blogging platform. Moveable type is website friendly, as well. Plus it’s easy to let your blog or website evolve as your traffic and needs change. It works well as a content management system, and it offers a social networking platform.

Moveable Type calls itself “a single, unified solution for websites and blogs.” With one download, set up multiple blogs and websites and manage all of them from one efficient dashboard. For example, if you have multiple blogs, you can change or update just one blog or website or all of them at the same time with only one click. Moveable Type also has a track changes feature, as well, and as a content management system, you can view data from the dashboard.

In the world of blogging, competition to set your website apart from others is strong. Readers only have a certain amount of time per day, to read, sort through and discuss interesting posts. Thus, it is vital that you continually have engaging, interesting, and informative content to keep them wanting more. Guest blogging can be extremely useful.

What Are the Benefits of Having a Guest Blogger?

Simply put, having a guest blogger is a great way to infuse new insight into your blog. The words, phrases, and wisdoms in a guest blog post are most likely going to be unlike anything you would have to say yourself. This keeps the tone of your blog fresh, informative, exciting, and even fun. By having a guest blogger take part in your website, you are allowing their life experiences, anecdotes, and informative thoughts engage your blog following.

What Are the Benefits of Being a Guest Blogger?

The benefits to being a guest blogger are nearly identical to having a guest blogger. Exposure of your thoughts, ideas, focuses, anecdotes, and more are a great way to bring attention to your own blog. If readers find you engaging and intriguing, they are quite apt to read your page on a regular basis.

This is an excellent way for small businesses to lend their expertise to personal blog, getting free exposure to a whole new readership.

How Do You Invite Someone to Be a Guest Blogger?

The steps needed in order to invite someone to be a guest blogger are actually quite easy. Of course, it will depend on whether you know the person or not. A friend, family member, or business acquaintance might agree if you simply ask. Someone you are not on a familiar basis with may need a bit more encouragement. Either way, it is important to let them know the tone of your blog, why you chose them to share with your readers, and possible a topic you would like them to cover.

How Do You Ask to Be a Guest Blogger?

Again, the relationship you have with the blog owner will usually dictate how you ask. If your brother runs a wildly successful blog about deer hunting and you work for an ammunition manufacturer, then simply asking him if you can take part is probably appropriate. However, if you have a favorite blog about hunting, yet have never met the blog owner, a query letter might be a bit more appropriate. List the reasons why you believe you would add value to their page and suggest a topic you would like to cover. This is an excellent way for small businesses to lend their expertise to personal blog, getting free exposure to a whole new readership.

Giving your business a social media presence can be a tall order—especially if you are trying to do it all by yourself. If you’re a one-person business, this can’t be helped; but if you have employees, why not start with them? Using a blog to get information from your employees is called internal blogging, and if done correctly, can make writing your external blog and creating social media engagement that much easier.

Internal blogging can serve several purposes. First, it can give you ideas for the external blog that both current and potential customers see. It also gives your employees a voice in your company and a forum to share news, note accomplishments and shine a spotlight on your employees who go above and beyond.

So, how do you set up an internal blog? The same way you set up an external one, only instead of hosting it externally on a server,  or blog site, you host it on the internal network. A quick memo or email to all employees announcing the launch of the internal blog along with a request for submissions will get the ball rolling. Before you know it, you’ll have department announcements, employee pictures from local events where they represented the company and a host of other pieces of information about your business that you might not have realized existed. All of this will make great fodder for the internal blog.

Another benefit to the internal blog is that it opens up communication among employees and management of the company. Allow comments on the blog so employees can discuss postings, and pay attention to what your employees have to say.

Why is this important?

Think of it this way: You want to launch an external blog so you can meet your customer’s needs, find out where your products or services might be lacking or excelling and determine what they find important. Doesn’t it make sense that you would want that same information from your employees, the people without whom you most likely would not have customers?

An internal blog is a great springboard for conveying information between your employees and can help you find things to share with your customers.

Convinced? Good. Now, this is how you take the internal blog and use it to your advantage for the blog your customers read.

Review the posts on your internal blog and select the best posts for a period of time. You can make the selection yourself, you can select a committee or you can have all the employees vote. The period of time you choose will depend on the amount of posts, the relevance of the posts and how frequently you plan to update the external blog.

Once you have selected posts, use them to populate information on your external blog. The posts could focus on your company’s community involvement but can really be about anything interesting. Pictures from the company picnic, posts about employees who have been promoted or received an award or information about new products that were announced on the internal blog can all be used on the external blog.

Once the blog has been updated, have your employees take to their Facebook pages and Twitter accounts and promote the blog. And be sure to monitor the blog and respond to any comments you get.

An internal blog is a great springboard for conveying information between your employees and can help you find things to share with your customers. So, go ahead and try it; there is no such thing as too much communication!

Like many looking for a serious and efficient platform for a web presence, you turned to WordPress as your tool of choice. Its versatility, wide range of free and lost cost professional templates and plugins, and interactive nature made it an easy decision. The site is up and everyone comments on how professional it looks and how great the posts are. But there’s just one problem; regardless of how often you post to that snazzy site, the posts just aren’t showing up in search engine results.

WordPress is a great choice for serious bloggers, but like any out of the box solution it has a few limitations when it comes to search engine optimization. The good news is that there is a world of free and inexpensive WordPress SEO plugins to solve any problems you might be having. They will help your WordPress site stand up and be noticed in the search engine crawling wars. Not wanting to go unnoticed, the two best plugins are first in this list:

All in One SEO Pack—This free plugin can be used by beginners and experts alike and allows for a fair range of modifications to your WordPress blog. Customizing your post title, description, and tags on each individual post is a snap. You can use this tool to set basics like page titles, keywords, meta tags, and descriptions across the entire blog.

SEO Sniper—Yes, this one costs something, but it is a small investment for the kind of power this catch-all SEO plugin brings to experienced SEO writers and developers. Based on the Dan Thies’ SEO Fast Start manual, this plugin is made for those already fairly proficient in SEO that want to take control of their WordPress site to a whole new level. The list of features is so long that the best thing you can do is give this one a test drive for yourself. It comes with a risk-free guarantee and is well worth the money.

The rest of these plugins are free, so knock yourself out:

Broken Link Checker—An essential; it notifies you when a link has become a dead-end to search engines. Nothing outside your own site is in your control, but dead links wreak havoc on internal SEO quality. This plugin will also alert you to missing images.

SEO Friendly Images—An optimization plugin that automatically updates every image on your site with correct alt and title attributes. This one simple correction can multiply your results in Google Image Search results.

SEO Slugs—Search engines such as Google are apt to disregard common keywords such as ‘a’, ‘the’, and ‘what’. By removing these keywords search engine rankings rise. What makes this little jewel so great is that it does this automatically without you having to give the task another thought.

Robots Meta—It is often a good idea to prevent indexing of search results and category pages, as some search engines see these as duplicate content, thus lowering your page rank. This free plugin allows for control over which pages and posts are indexed and which aren’t.

These plugins are a good place to start, but know that this is only the beginning of what is available to optimize your WordPress site. To learn more, check out WordPress.org.

Tim G is a freelance writer available on WriterAccess, a marketplace where clients and expert writers connect for assignments. WriterAccess is powered by ideaLaunch, a full service content marketing agency serving hundreds of clients and thousands of writers since 2000.

See if this sounds familiar. Your blog started out like a first date with a gorgeous heartthrob. You couldn’t wait to spend time together, and spent all day thinking about all the things you want to tell them. But then one day you looked forlornly into the eyes of your WYSIWYG editor, and had the sinking feeling that the date had become a relationship you weren’t quite prepared for. A few 300 word articles per week didn’t seem like much to begin with, and you hit your first 500 regular visitors in a flash. But as the weeks dragged on, you realize you’ll need to put in a lot more time to grow this thing than you first realized. Here are a couple of practical ideas for both managing and growing your blog, so you don’t end up neglecting and ultimately ruining that coveted relationship.

A Simple Way to Stay Ahead of the Game

Because consistently fresh and meaningful posts are essential to the life of a growing blog, you need to have a plan for future content. A simple, free tool for managing content is Windows Live Writer. Microsoft’s Windows Life Writer is a blog content service that has a clean user interface that makes managing your blog simple, regardless of where and how it is hosted. As you get an idea for a new post go ahead and give it a name and get started. You can then save the post as a draft and publish it later. This way, when you get an idea for a post you can get started, flesh it out along the way, and then publish it when you are satisfied you’ve done the best possible job with it.

Live Writer helps organize your posts through categories. With some forethought you can plan what articles you need to be working on based on popular categories in your blog. As information crosses your desk that jives with a category that isn’t needed until next month, you can begin an outline of the post ahead of time. The longer you use this system, the quicker you will find yourself finishing posts and moving on to other things that need to be done.

How to Avoid Hitting the Wall

Some bloggers don’t have much success growing their blog because they have no real way to measure visitors. Don’t use comments as a gauge of how effective your blog is. The ratio of visitors to comments on a business blog is almost always very low. One of the most measurable tools you can use is something like Networked Blogs in conjunction with a Facebook business page. Networked Blogs is also free and allows you to build a network of followers that is visibly measurable. Status comments about your blog can be made directly to followers of your blog via Facebook.

Like a relationship, the key to a growing a blog is not to rely on just one thing to make it grow. RSS feeds are great, as are tools like Feedburner; and there are plenty of great tools being developed every day for the ever-growing community of bloggers. But to increase blog traffic, one learns to use choice tools that work for them, and in a more multi-faceted approach. Everything you do should point back to that blog in some way and, if you have a business website, everything in your blog should point back to your site.

Tim G is a freelance writer available on WriterAccess, a marketplace where clients and expert writers connect for assignments. WriterAccess is powered by ideaLaunch, a full service content marketing agency serving hundreds of clients and thousands of writers since 2000.