Both! Right?

Well, after attending a panel discussion of local bloggers in Richmond, I’m not absolutely sure.

John and Sherry Tetersik from ThisYoungHouse.com, Arnold Kim from MacRumors.com and Jeff Kelley from Tobacco Avenue made quite a few points that resonated with me.

All bloggers stated that they didn’t practice any formal SEO strategies with their blogs…and all 3 had great traffic that is continuing to grow. As a matter of fact, ThisYoungHouse.com has jumped from 800 visits per month to over 360,000 per month…in a year! No SEO folks.

Just pure, compelling, unique content that is updated 2-3 times per day. This couple actually takes photos of projects from their home, not from magazines or other sites (well, on occasion they do). They have a growing community of readers who come back again and again and post comments! 

When asked how they got readers, all of the bloggers agreed…“Good, regular content” 

John and Sherry added that being a good consumer of other industry-related blogs has been key for them. This means…

• Reading and commenting on other blogs
• Linking to other blogs in posts
• Adding other blogs to your blogroll

Bloggers are known for their regular give and take…link love is often reciprocated.

One more point that is pretty key, in my humble opinion, is that they all agreed that a tightly focused subject in which a large group of people are interested contributes to their success.

I did look at the number of backlinks using Yahoo! and the numbers are quite impressive:

• ThisYoungHouse = 12,619 (Blog Age – 1 year, 5 months)
• MacRumors = 1,012,788 (Blog Age – about 9 years)
• Tobacco Avenue = 9,650 (Blog Age – 1 year, 3 months)

What’s important to note about these backlinks is that many of them come from pages on their blogs…another beautiful thing about the blogging platform. Think about it if you write 3 posts a day for 1 year, you will have 1,095 backlinks. In addition, with WordPress, each category generates its own page and each tag generates a page. You’ll probably have at least an “About” page and if you build your entire site in WordPress, you will most likely have more than a few pages. 

ThisYoungHouse has actually become quite popular, has been mentioned in mainstream press and has a regular column in a national magazine, so I’m sure that many of their links are from other industry-related sites who genuinely think their content is great and link-worthy. I’d have to confirm, but I’m pretty sure (based on the number of hours they spend running the site) that they are not building many of these backlinks manually. This is what happens when you have a blog that generates a great following.

So, what’s the takeaway…there are several…

1. Build a great website about a topic in which you know people are interested
2. Nurture your website by updating content regularly (this is a lot easier if you have a blog, so the next one is…)
3. Start a blog
4. Give love to other blogs
5. Don’t stress out about not ranking on the first page of Google for your keyword or phrase
6. Focus on doing great work and building a community of readers

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Melanie Jordan consistently drives traffic to her blog through her podcast and to her opt-in list through her blog and podcast.

To hear this, you have to listen for yourself.

Here is an example from her blog:

And if you enjoyed this post, you’re my kind of infopreneur, and I want to help make your 2009 your year!  I invite you to join my subscriber-only free infopreneur teleseminar series which kicks off later this month, and goes into lots more detail than I can in my infopreneur blog.  Join my list today to be sure you have access to these special free infopreneur teleseminar events!  CLICK HERE You’ll also get some additional free subscriber bonuses, and subscriber-only discounts such as one on my forthcoming infopreneur book, as my thank you to boot!

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Here’s a summary of the tips, but you must read the entire article for the meat and great examples:

10 SEO tips that I know can have a profound impact on your search traffic:

1. Adopt the proper mindset
2. Prepare the targeted keywords in advance
3. Target 3 and 4 word phrases
4. Know where to find the right key phrases
5. Choose the right 3 and 4 word phrases to target
6. Optimize page titles and permalinks
7. Optimize the internal links within your site
8. Add No Index meta tags
9. Remove unnecessary links
10. Building up a ridiculously sized tag cloud can be a good thing
    

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1. Have 5, preferably 8-10 articles/posts already published on the blog

2. Have at least 5 draft posts already written and saved as drafts

3. Have a list of 20 post ideas for future topics and articles

These are excellent suggestions and I’ve recently started writing and scheduling a few posts at a time, which is really easy to do in WordPress and Blogger. Knowing the importance of always having fresh content for readers and the search engines, the pressure to think of a new topic to write about every day was too much for me. So now, I have at least 5 posts not just saved as drafts, but scheduled to be posted for the next several days. I hope to always stay ahead of the curve and eventually have 10 scheduled.

Dedicating an hour or 2 on one day of the week is a lot easier for me. Share your challenges, writing schedule and strategies for blogging in the comments.

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