I was inspired to write today because one of my readers sent me a friendly reminder that I have an interesting blog, but that I had not posted since JULY!!!!

That’s like the #1 rule of blogging that I broke, post often.

Due to many things going on in life like, my PHOTO BOOTH Rental business growing tremendously, My Houston DJ Service business BOOMING with events, dedicating as much time to my wife and daughters as possible (there is never enough time in the world for that) and maintaining a ‘regular job’ from Monday through Friday… I’ve left blogging to the side.

Blogging is an important part of any online business. I’ve grown two very successful businesses through blogging and I’ve helped countless other people do the same. I guess because of my success that I’ve already achieved I’ve left blogging alone for, well now going on two months. It has not affected my bottom line, I have established both of my wedding vendor websites on the first page of Google.com for my targeted keywords and the business has been so steady that I actually turn away business on a daily basis.

But that is no excuse to find an hour a day to dedicate to my blogging habits.

Wedding Marketing News

As time goes on, I am finding out that more and more Wedding vendors are creating new blogs incorrectly. And that is by going to the FREE blogging platforms and getting a blog started on Wordpress.com, Blogger.com or Blogspot.com.

Those who spend the extra $50 to have a blog installed on their domain name will almost instantly see the effects of it.

When you get a free blog at wordpress.com, for example, your domain name is
my-wedding-blog.wordpress.com.
So wordpress.com gets credit for everything you post and all the traffic that you generate.  Your website will never get any credit for that. Why is that important? Well the reason you blog is #1 to attract readers to your blog and #2 to attract traffic for the search engines… in order of importance. And in the hopes that those readers or that traffic converts into a lead and then into a client.

When you get a blog at your website, my-website.com, for example, the blog would be
my-blog.my-website.com
and all the traffic generated by your blogging efforts will go to my-website.com. So every time you create a new blog post, the search engines start ranking your website since it is hosted by you, not the FREE blogging websites.

Getting a blog through blogger, blogspot, or wordpress.com is free and easy for many reasons …

1. All your hard efforts WILL go unrewarded, the FREE Hosts get ALL the benefits
2. Your website will NOT get credit for any new traffic that you generate (Traffic is key to any website). the FREE Hosts get ALL the traffic benefits
3. It is NOT a professional way to blog (Kinda like printing your own business cards at home)
4. Whenever you post a new blog post, the search engines WILL NOT index your site, the FREE Hosts get ALL the benefits
5. Your Website WILL NOT move up in the search engine rankings for your targeted keywords, the FREE Hosts get ALL the benefits
6. You CANNOT target your keywords effectively, the FREE Hosts get ALL the benefits
7. YOU DON”T OWN YOUR BLOG!!! (At anytime, for any reason they can take it away and leave you back at NOTHING). This has happened over and over again and why would you risk someone taking away your blog? All the hard work and brainstorming that you have done… GONE, in an instant, no warning, to time to back up, no time to save or transfer your previous posts… just GONE!

Do you remember when websites first came out, NOBODY wanted to invest in putting their website on their very own domain name. People would go to the free hosting places like Geocities or AOL and they would put that address on their website on their Professionally designed business cards. I can even remember people not wanting to tell others they had a website for that same reason… they were ashamed of it… cuz it was free, or very badly developed. Man how times have changed.

Now, YOU KNOW you must put your website on your own domain name because it looks more professional.
Today, we are in the same situation with blogging. We don’t now what is the best way to do it, so we see what others are doing and we figure, hey if they are doing it, why can’t I? Right?  Save yourself a few years of going in the wrong direction.  PUT YOUR BLOG ON YOUR DOMAIN NAME.

I would NOT recommend that you go out and buy a new domain name for your blog as it will also not help you in your quest for more traffic and better search engine results.

Here are the top 5 Reasons I’ve discovered of why hosting your blog on your already-existing domain name helps your search engine rankings.

1. Every time  you post a new article, the blogging software automatically pings, or tells the search engines, that there is some new content on your webstie.  Search Engines LOVE new, unique content, so they visit your website and add it to their search results.
2. Every Post increases your page count. This is important because the more pages that you have the more authority that your site builds up.
3. You can target MORE keywords that you are going after. So if you find a new keyword that you want to rank for, you simply write a new post about it, do some search engine optimization and before you know it you will be ranked for those keywords. I used this to get ranked for Wedding Venues in the houston area, up lighting, etc…
4. Your clients only need to remember 1 domain name.
5. It is the most effective use of your time.

So spend some money, to the right thing and host your blog on your professional website. You will almost immediately see the power of a blog!

Happy Bloggin!

|o| Simply Frank |o|

Bloggin Wedding DJ in Houston

Did you know you could use your blog to easily increase and climb up the search engine results?

Disclaimer: This will not work for you if your blog is hosted on a 3rd party host such as blogspot.com, blogger.com, typepad.com, wordpress.com, or any other FREE blogging host.

Here is a bit of background on this subject.

Did you know that if Google.com does not find many relevant websites that contain the keyword phrase that a user is looking for, they will just start adding results that Google thinks may be relevant to the search results? Most of the time they really are not even close to what the user is searching for. If you EVER see anything like this, it’s clear that there are very little to no websites out there that are targeting those keywords.

Let me give you a live example, because I suck at explaining concepts…

A few days ago, and I do mean Days, I was not even close to being ranked for the keywords “Gobo Design Houston.”  In fact the top spots were for very non related websites. There was one gobo design company in Houston and the rest were either from California, Gobo Manufacturers (not designers), and well wedding DJ’s from other cities and states.

What that means is that there either were very little to none actual websites that Google could show to people looking for a GOBO Designer in Houston or some poorly optimized websites of gobo designers.

I wrote a short article entitled, “Gobo Designs in Houston” and Viola!!!  My Website is Ranked #3 & #4 for the keywords “Gobo Design Houston” Not only That, I received a couple of  unrequested links to my website with the same keywords, a Digg and they are ranked #1, #2 &#10 for those keywords.

So Where I was not even ranked before, I now  own 5 of the 10 positions on the front page of the search engine results. It took actually a few minutes to an Hour for my website to be ranked so high with those keywords…

WHY?

As stated before…

1. Lack of competition
2. lack of websites targeting those words
3. lack of knowledge from business owners who are targeting those keywords.

What’s in it for me?

More business! More income! More Clients! More people going through my sales funnel and not only needing gobo design, but possibly even a DJ or a Photo Booth!

This is a great example of bloggin for the sole purpose of increasing Traffic to your website.  Additionally, be sure to track your traffic to see where it comes from and how you can use this one idea to increase traffic by capturing related terms to this search keyword.

There you have it, now go out and try it for yourself, be sure to use the google keyword analytics tool as discussed on the post on how to “Grow Your Wedding Traffic, One Simple Technique to Try” to gather ideas for keywords you may want to target.

Give it a try!!

Happy Bloggin!

–
|o| Simply Frank |o|
Bloggin Wedding DJ

June was the beginning of the wedding season.

Traffic was “off the charts”, as they say. I’ve recorded record numbers of brides searching for services and information on the web. January used to be the month I looked foreword to every month and prepared my websites for the excess amount of traffic. I would normally have a good deal, a discount or even a small gift for them so that I could get the leads.  Needless to say this month I was not even ready for that..

Below are the comparisons:

First Let’s Show the past 30 days overall increase in traffic across all my websites.

Note: I am using Google Analytics and their numbers are always lower since they use JavaScript to track customers and a lot of customers have JavaScript turned off so they are never recorded.

As you can see All websites show a good amount of increased traffic. A good website, probably yours, if it’s doing good, gets the same amount of traffic as HoustonPartyBooths.com (521 Unique Visitors for the month of June 2009). Although Traffic was down for HoustonPartyBooths.com the number of inquiries was up, which is odd.

FHPEntertainment.com, according to Google Analytics is at 4,247 Unique Visitors for the month of June 2009. That is around 10 times more traffic than your average good website.

Ok, on to what really matters to you..

Wedding Traffic Trends for 2008

What you can see from that chart is that January did really well…Then it Dropped in February, Picked back up in March and started going downhill until June… then it spiked back up in July.

That was almost identical in 2007.

This year the traffic trend is completely different. So I was shocked and was actually looking forword to actually see what it would look like.

Wedding Traffic Trends for 2009

This year January Spiked quite a bit, and as expected it died down for February. Also as Expected it picked back up in March, however, it kept going up in April and May, and Just shot straight up in June. Where last year June was really low.

The actual numbers, according to TraceWatch, a tracking software that I use on my server and is alot more accurate than Google Analytics, is 6,447 Unique Visitors for the month of June 2009 and 25,076 Hits (or page views) to my pages. That is the most EVER!

Compare that to June 2008 where I received 3,946 Unique Visitors and 13,286 Hits (or page views). Almost a 100% increase in traffic!!!

So does bloggin work for traffic?

You bet your sweet ass it does!

Happy Bloggin!

–
|o| Simply Frank |o|
Bloggin Wedding DJ in Hosuton

As you all know, I love to keep up with all kinds of stats. More than I know what to do with, honestly. Today I was going through my visitor tracking program and I realized that I got traffic for things I never knew I would get traffic for. I got a visitor today for a person who was looking for “Good DJ Websites.” On the results page of Google, I show up as the #8 Result.

Isn’t that pretty neat??

That kinda led into my next idea, well that and the fact that I just revisited my two landing pages on my website: The one for Weddings and the one for Quinceaneras.

On a quick note, a landing page is a page designed to motivate your potential client into giving you his information.  So good Landing Page design is supposed to build confidence on your product or service, informing your potential client completely about what you can do for him, and answer the question what’s in it for me. Accomplish those objectives within your landing page and you will motivate your visitor to take action. After all, as I stated before, if he is not motivated enough to take action the first time, what will motivate him to come back again to your website?

I had not really looked at these pages in a while, and I have to say, they are horrible!!! I can’t believe I let them stay up as long as they have. They look very poorly made, and have absolutely no motivation for brides to contact me. As I stated before on a post, I get an average of 32 leads per month from potential clients that want to know more information about my services.

One thing to take note on, is that this was probably throughout the busiest time of the year. The beginning of the year, brides are looking for wedding vendors online, more than any other time.

So I guess the crappy looking page that is on that page right now is not really stopping them. There are countless errors and things not lining up. Honestly I’m ashamed of my work, so starting tomorrow I’m going to go through and redo these two pages, starting with the Quinceanera page and then on the the Weddings page.

I also would love to redo my DJ Upgrades, Up lighting, Monogram and Interactive DJ options page to match the new landing pages.

Stay tooned as I go through this transformation!

Happy Bloggin!

–
|o| Simply Frank |o|

Bloggin Wedding DJ in Houston

Microsoft has released it’s new search engine called Bing (See it at Bing.com). I was curious when I started seeing visitors come to my websites from this new site, so I did a little research and found out what it was.

Bing is designed to be a “decision engine” to help people search the Web more intelligently and to simplify everyday tasks such as getting directions, and said the tool is aimed at giving people more ways to organize search results to their preferences.

Check out the new search engine and see how well you rank on its search engine results…

My search term results seem to match closely what Google has on their front page… But definitely check it out and see how it ranks your website.

Happy Bloggin!

–
|o| Simply Frank |o|
Bloggin Wedding DJ in Houston