The Best Posts from Around the Internet about Information Marketing

Welcome to the first ever edition of the Information Marketing Roundup. In this roundup, we will cover the gamut from internet marketing, copywriting, social media, search engine optimization, WordPress, blogging, and everything in between.

Blogging

First up is a post about (finally) making money from your blog, brought to you by Pro Blogger.

–> http://www.problogger.net/archives/2013/12/31/2014-reboot-make-money-from-your-blog-this-year/

What I like about this post, and Pro Blogger in general, is that Darren Rowse lets it all hang out, giving the bad, the good, and the in-between.

On one hand, we see hype on the topic. Periodically someone will claim to be able to make millions from blogging quickly. These claims are usually accompanied with the release of a product or service (i.e. they are marketing spin).

On the other hand, I periodically see people writing about how it is impossible to make money blogging (or that anyone claiming to be full time is either a scammer, a liar, or is selling something on the topic of making money online).

The reality is somewhere between these two extremes.

This is really worth a careful read. Even though this post was published originally in 2012, all of the concepts covered in this post still apply today.

Next up in the Blogging category is none other than blog traffic expert, Ana Hoffman, from Traffic Generation Cafe. Her post, entitled, “202 Bite-Sized Tips To Insanely Increase Your Blog Traffic“, gives you a ton of ideas for increasing traffic to your web site.

–> http://www.trafficgenerationcafe.com/increase-blog-traffic/

Some gems:

• Give away your very best content and then some.
• Write exclusively about a certain theme for a week.
• Update an old post with new ideas.
• Mention some useful, but little known resources.
• Aggregate ideas, tips, etc. from numerous places/blogs into a blog post. (This is what I am doing right now.)

Ana is a go-to expert on blogging, specifically on driving huge traffic to a blog.

Information Marketing

Next up is one of my very own posts that I'm especially proud of. It's called “Laying the Foundation” and it's all about setting up your web site and online profiles so that you can be a prolific blogger and information marketer.

–> http://internet-marketing-muscle.com/foundation/

This post covers keyword research, buying a domain name, web hosting, setting up a WordPress web site, setting up your social media profiles, and a whole lot more.

Social Media

Guy Kawasaki brings us our next entry, in Social Media, called, “Posting Best Practices“. This was a post that he submitted on LinkedIn, and it offers a host of good suggestions on posting: Frequency, topics, and best practices.

–> http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20131230190747-2484700-posting-best-practices

Some goodies:

• Be brief.
• Give credit.
• Add a hashtag.
• Repeat your tweets.
• And a lot more.

I really like everything Guy posts. It's all simply awesome stuff. I also use Alltop (his creation) to find content that I can curate, like I'm doing right here.

Content Marketing

I love Copy Blogger, especially Sonia Simone! It's an excellent resource for all things information marketing. A recent post I really like is called, “The New Year’s Writing Resolution You Can Actually Keep“. Timely, right?

–> http://www.copyblogger.com/just-write/

The salient point of the post:

Every day in January, write for 20 minutes.

By every day, I mean every day. Including weekends. Including the Martin Luther King holiday. Including the days that get crazy.

If you’re not in the hospital with two broken arms, write every day. For 20 minutes.

During your 20 minutes, turn off all distractions. Set your phone to Do Not Disturb, or shut off the ringer. Quit your email service. And for heaven’s sake, get rid of all social media.

Next is another of my own posts, called, “Content Is and Always Will Be King“. It's all about content and content marketing. It's a massive post – so take some time to read it. You can find out more about me on Google+ here.

–> http://internet-marketing-muscle.com/content-is-king/

The main points of the post are:

• Create your own content.
• Curate other peoples' content.
• Circulate the content you create and curate.
• Multicast your content (i.e., repurpose your content).

Search Engine Optimization

I have 2 entries for you in the SEO section. The first one up is from Rand Fishkin, of MOZ, entitled, “Building SEO-Focused Pages to Serve Topics & People Rather than Keywords & Rankings“. I like these “Whiteboard Friday” posts that Rand makes. They are always quite interesting and full of good information.

–> http://moz.com/blog/topics-people-over-keywords-rankings-whiteboard-friday

In this one, he talks about semantic search and how search algorithms are making it easier for SEO professionals to do their work. This is a really good thing!

It's about time, right?

With updates like Hummingbird, Google is getting better and better at determining what's relevant to you and what you're looking for. This can actually help our work in SEO, as it means we don't have to focus quite so intently on specific keywords.

Makes a ton of sense!

Last up, and sure to be controversial is “2014 What's Working” by Andy over at Make Money Ninja. This is an SEO post from a real guy who does this stuff. In this post, he lays out all the SEO stuff that he thinks will work in 2014 and what no longer works (or works well).

Some things that work:

• Purchased links.
• Purchased high-PR domains.
• Links from newspapers, press releases, and high PR directories.

Andy says almost every other backlink you may get will be ineffective (from an SEO standpoint). This definitely contrasts with my idea that making relevant, topical, and thoughtful comments on high authority blogs is a good thing…but not really. My take on this sort of “outreach” is more beneficial for the relationships you build and the direct traffic you can glean from doing it, as opposed to getting a high PR backlink by leaving a comment (that doesn't hurt).

In closing

I hope you enjoyed this very first information marketing roundup. I plan on doing these (at least) once per month, so you have 11 more to come in 2014. If you like this idea and want your web site to be considered for inclusion, please let me know in the Comments. Of course, I can't include every awesome post out there…but I also only know of the existence of about 0.0001 percent of the outstanding posts out there.

So please drop a comment if you like this and/or want me to consider your content for future roundups.