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Orbit’s Own Recipe: Blog Casserole with Newsletter Sauce

Guest post by: Andy Crestodina

Article Overview: Ever wonder how a web marketing company uses the web to market themselves? In this issue we invite you into our kitchen to share one of our most effective marketing recipes. So come on in and smell what we’re cooking…

Orbit’s Own Recipe: Blog Casserole with Newsletter Sauce

Blog Casserole with Newsletter Sauce A delicious blend of email marketing and blogging, with a side of social media and article marketing.

Assuming you already have a website and you’re looking to increase traffic, this can be a tasty and nutritious dish at a very low cost. Your only commitment is time: two to three hours in the content kitchen, crafting delicious content for your readers to devour, and another hour putting your creation in the oven to bake (that is, posting it online).

Serving frequency: 2-8 weeks

Ingredients 3 Cups of Text (article of 500 words or more)

This could be any information useful or interesting to your audience. Think about what they like or need and start writing. Here are a few tips to keep in mind:

- Choose a title for the article that’s short and spicy. It should grab attention and whet the appetite.

- Try to make the writing search friendly by including some phrases people search for on your topic. Better yet, start by researching phrases to make sure you’re aligning your writing with a popular – but not too competitive – keyphrase. As an example, this article uses the phrase “web marketing” which is a target keyphrase for Orbit.

- Cut it up into bite-sized pieces with lots of formatting: headers, sub-heads, bullet lists, bolding, etc. Avoid long dense paragraphs. Sprinkle in a few links to pages on your site. Links help readers dig in for seconds if they’re hungry for more. They also help search engines understand what the article’s about.

- Finally, we recommend having it edited by a professional to make sure there’s nothing in it that would make people queasy.

2 Tablespoons Supplementary Content

Spice it up! Add pictures, statistics, famous quotes, charts, jokes, citations from other articles on the topic, etc. Choose things that support the main article.

You’ll also need a kitchen with these small appliances:

-Blogging platform (we recommend WordPress)

-Email service provider (Constant Contact, Reach Mail, etc.)

-Content management system (we always use Mighty-Site)

Directions -First, put the article into your blogging platform as a post. Garnish this with a bit of your supplementary content. Adding even one graphic can really make the post more engaging. Make it live and turn the comments on.

-Add a short blurb and a link to the blog post on the home page of your site using your content management tool.

-Put the article into your email marketing tool. Add the rest of your supplementary content and mix well. Taste a spoonful, add any other ingredients it may need to be perfect, and send it to your list! Optional: if you use social media like Twitter and Facebook, don’t forget to tweet, post, and share.

-Cook at 350 degrees (wait) for three days.

-Check your results. Look at the open rate, the click through rate, and the number of visitors to your site over the next few days. If the cooking (and your list of recipients) is good, you should see open rates in the 10-15% range or more and a nice spike in site traffic. Also, keep an eye out for comments on your blog. If people comment, that’s good. Maybe you can start a conversation!

-Share Your Leftovers

It’s always smart to help less fortunate websites by sharing your new content. This is easy thanks to article marketing services. Just submit the article and needy website owners will come and pick it up. They get a page of content and you get a link back to your brilliance.

Tip: Change the article a bit before submitting it to one of these websites. Search engines don’t like duplicate content, so it’s best not to have the exact same version of the article on your site and other sites. So before uploading to an aggregator service, move some words around and reverse some sentences. Use different sauces and spices.

So now you know what we make in our own kitchen. This is nowhere near the whole cookbook, but if you’re hungry for traffic, we recommend whipping this up every 2-8 weeks Bon appétit!

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  The Three Core Components of Your On-Line Presence
  Don't Rely On Google Alone for Getting Traffic to Your Blog
  Personal Branding: Something Needed? YOU Provide It!
  Thinking In and Out of the Box
  Blog Marketing: 4 Best-Kept Secret Strategies to Double Your Blog Subscribers
  21 Ways to Promote Your Blog
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  Legal Marketing: How To Get Your Blog Read
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  Reduce, reuse, recycle and repurpose
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  “The Top Ten Benefits Of An E-Newsletter, According To Your Strategic Thinking Business Coach”
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  Recovery

Article Tags: article marketing, blog, blogging, email marketing, newsletter, SEO, social networking



Related Forum Posts
Re: Where do you buy cheap airplane tickets? - I think Orbits can get you pretty good deals. I've never used them myself, but I know people who have.
Re: Best Internet Marketing Strategy - Hi David, I agree about the Blogosphere. You have a smaller group that Blog, but do so on the premise that they think they should, but have never really considered the purpose of their Blog. Then I think there are a few SEO or Internet Marketing types that see Blogging as just another link building strategy. But the largest group of Bloggers, tend to be people who enjoy writing and discussing their topics of interest. Blogging is good for link building, but the true Blogger is a breed apart from the rest. They want to dialog, to debate, to have feedback and they are very willing to link to other worthwhile conversations that are relevant to their topic. I agree with you. These group of Bloggers obviously are passionate about their writing and together, they create huge conversation trails interactive and travel from Blog to Blog. But the evidence is clear with this group that loves what they write about. With comments enabled on a Blog and having a Blog tuned to a specific purpose you already have the evidence of original Social Media.
Re: Alexa Ranking Goals - That's great GT! What method did you use to put up the Entrepreneur Blog Network in your Wordpress Blog? We're always looking for the easiest methods to help bloggers who are not techies get involved.
Re: Forums Blog? - [quote="Evan":1yww01zw]Interesting idea Don. In my weekly newsletter I show the most recent forum posts and on the side of every page on the website (not the forums) I also show the most recent entries.[/quote:1yww01zw] The Newsletter update is great for people _already_ signed up to the forums. The Blog would be a teaser for those who are unaware of it entirely. [quote="Evan":1yww01zw]How often would you see the blog being updated?[/quote:1yww01zw] I would say no more frequently than once a week. It would be more an an ad than an interactive forum. Although, that can change. [quote="Evan":1yww01zw]Any other ideas out there on a blog or ways to show the most popular topics?[/quote:1yww01zw] If you really want a big Internet Presence, this is what I have learned works very well: 1/ Website 2/ Blog 3/ MySpace 4/ Press Release 5/ Ads posted on free & paid classified websites 6/ Networking 7/ website submission to search engines You will notice that only 1 out of the 7 requires human contact. The other 6 will begin to create a presence and if the right keywords are used, then people doing searches for those keywords will find many references to this site. Networking helps build your 'real world presence'. I haven't done any aggressive marketing of my site yet the hits just keep on increasing on a monthly basis. I'm on track to be making 20,000 hits (probably more) this year. Not bad for not spending a dime on advertising and being fairly casual about what I do with the site. That's what I have learned thus far online. The more I learn, the more hits grow.
EvanCarmichael.com suggestion - Maybe I missed it but I would like to suggest that a Blog be created to support the Forum. The idea is that in the blog you put in snippets of some of the biggest conversations with a 'read more' link to the forum itself. Setting up the Blog and clipping some conversations onto it wouldn't take very long.


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