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This session explores how specialized blog and feed (RSS/Atom) search engines gather content and provides tips on tapping into these growing forms of traffic.

Moderator:
Detlev Johnson, VP, Director of Consulting, Position Technologies

Speakers:
Amanda Watlington, Ph.D., APR, Searching for Profit
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts, LLC
Rick Klau, FeedBurner

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• a showcase for Web 2.0 ‘done right’
• site built upon web standards and accessibility
• easy for visitors to find and compare service providers based on referrals and recommendations from business people and past clients
• ranked search result based on peer reviews and user feedback

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• A corporate website souped-up by Web 2.0 technologies: a blog platform for a CMS, RSS feeds, tag clouds, tag pages, comments, trackbacks, pingbacks…
• Went from 100,000 pageviews per month to 390,000 within just a few months of relaunch.
• A marked increase in visitor numbers as well: 28,000 to about 60,000 from about in that same timeframe.
• indexation in Google increased from 300 pages to 4,800 pages, including 2,640 tag pages.

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Abny Santicola, Editor, FundRaising Success Advisor, calls on the expertise of Netconcepts’ Founder and President, Stephan Spencer last week at Direct Marketing Association’s (DMA) Annual Conference & Expo in San Francisco. Abny caught up with Spencer after his “Blogs, Podcasts and RSS: New Tools for Customer Acquisition and CRM” conference session.

In this article, Spencer discusses how blogs can serve as great marketing tools for non-profit organizations as well. Spencer also shares his success with, humanitarian organization and personal blog of former President Jimmy Carter, The Carter Center.

Spencer closes with 5 insider-tips for making the most of a blog.

Read this entire article and learn key blog concepts to put your non-profit on the blogosphere map.

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Links are the currency of the search engines. Without good inbound links to your web site, your SEO efforts will be in vain. Link building is arguably the most difficult, most misunderstood, and most poorly executed aspect to SEO. Join SEO and link-building experts Stephan Spencer and Eric Ward as they guide us through the quagmire and show us the way to great search engine rankings.

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This dynamic, multi-faceted session will focus on how to effectively use the new technologies of blogs, podcasting, and RSS to reach and retain customers. You will learn proven strategies and sure-fire tactics for how to leverage your blog’s ability to reach and influence your customers, prospects, and the media. In this session, we’ll show you how other marketers are already successfully integrating blogs, RSS, and podcasting into their online marketing communications mix, and achieving deeper more personalized relationships with their customers.

Learning Points:

• Successfully use blogs and podcasts as direct marketing tools for getting your selling messages in front of prospective customers
• Discover proven strategies for using your blog to reach the media and gain competitive advantage
• Master top tips for optimizing your blog so that it improves your search engine marketing

Panelists:

• Lee Odden, CEO, TopRank Online Marketing
• Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts
• Dr. Amanda Watlington, Owner, Searching For Profit

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Web content guru Gerry McGovern, author of “Killer Content” - one of the best books on writing copy for the web - says that one of the biggest mistakes companies make in regards to their website content is thinking that customers care one little bit about the company. “Customers care about themselves (their loved ones and their community),” he said in an interview with founder and president of Netconcepts, Stephan Spencer. He went on to add that organizations need to be customer-centric, talk about benefits, and speak the language of the customer.

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Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a great way to deliver content into the hands of potential website visitors. It is also a channel for syndicating your content onto others’ websites, which equates to free inbound links. Netconcepts’ founder and president Stephan Spencer shares some crucial tactics for maximizing the SEO benefit of your site’s RSS feeds.

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Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz has graciously shared 21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic, and there are some gems in there. I’d like to piggyback on a few of Rand’s points:

• 1. Choose the Right Blog Software (or Custom Build) — I’d say that over 95% of the time, WordPress will do the job and will be scalable for future needs. I have yet to come across a client blog project that necessitated a custom-built blog software.
• 2. Host Your Blog Directly on Your Domain — Rand makes a bold statement: “Hosting your blog on a different domain from your primary site is one of the worst mistakes you can make.” I disagree. I can think of numerous examples where the blog is more trusted, more buzzworthy, and/or more linkworthy because it’s at an arms length from the company’s site. Consider the hypothetical example of an insurance conglomerate authoring a blog about getting a healthier lifestyle, in order to attract prospects to sell insurance to. Such a blog at Gettinghealthy.com sounds helpful and unbiased, whereas having it at metlife.com/gettinghealthyblog (remember, hypothetical example… metlife is just used here to illustrate the point) comes off as salesy and self-serving.
• 4. Participate at Related Forums & Blogs — I’d just like to make it clear that you’re not doing this for link juice (most links in blog comments and forum posts have “link condoms” (rel=nofollow tags) automatically added). Instead, you’re doing this to increase your visibility to, and credibility with, bloggers who read those blogs and forums.
• 9. Invite Guest Bloggers — I really like this idea, and I’d like to add my suggestion that you also do phone or Skype interviews of guests and podcast those on your blog.
• 15. Archive Effectively — Rand highlights a tough balancing act: “For search traffic (particularly long tail terms), it can be best to offer the full content of every post in a category on the archive pages, but from a usability standpoint, just linking to each post is far better (possibly with a very short snippet). ” I find the “Optional Excerpt” in WordPress to be invaluable for achieving this balance. The Optional Excerpt is one of the fields in the Write Post form that most bloggers ignore, but if you use it, you can code your non-permalink pages (like your category pages) to display the excerpt instead of the full post or instead of the paragraphs proceeding a “more” tag in your post copy. That’s exactly what we’ve done on my company’s corporate site, which runs on WordPress — for example, all the testimonials listed on our Testimonials tag page display excerpts. That gives you more flexibility to summarize and highlight particular sections or keywords from the full post.
• 16. Implement Smart URLs — Rand says that “just re-writing a ?ID=450 to /450 has improved search traffic considerably on several blogs we’ve worked with.” I would definitely agree with that. We too have evidence that a blog or site with rewritten URLs flows PageRank more efficiently throughout the site. So don’t rest on your laurels if you have a blog with dynamic URLs, even if your blog is fully indexed by the engines. Your pages will rank better if you rewrite the URLs.
• 19. Make Effective Use of High Traffic Days — What a great idea, to watch your traffic and increase your posting frequency and posting quality on days where your traffic is highest! It makes the best use of the traffic spikes. In fact, you might even want to hold back on publishing your very best posts and instead save them for high-traffic days.

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