I am NOT a search engine marketing guru, but I hold #1 and #2 spots on all the search engines for ALL my targeted keywrods.

Ranking high on the search engines is crucial if you do any kind of online marketing. The people who know the secrets want to charge you an arm an a leg for something they cannot guarantee. Once you stop paying them, you lose out on the benefit and you see your search traffic and website visitors die down.

Blogging allows you to keep your website up to date. Just by writing at least once a week, you can keep your search engine rankings and your search traffic at a constant level and you don’t have to depend on your online marketer for your website’s success.

Here are a few tips to consider if you want your search engine traffic to remain at a constant level.

1. Post to your Blog Often.

   Search engines want to give its users, the brides (or anyone using the search engine), the most up-to-date results as well as the most relative results when they search for something. The rule of thumb I use is, the longer I go without posting to my blog, the lower my search engine result will be. Ideally I would like to post an article every weekday to my blog, but in reality I only get to do so about once or twice a week. Also, if you establish a fan base for your blog, they will expect to read from you often. They want that free, valuable advice you have to give them. Some visitors will even rely on what you have to say. Even though at first you may think this is not good for your business, it is. Giving away, free valuable advice helps those brides that are about to make a decision.

2. Target a Wide Variety of Keywords in your Titles.

   The bloggers with most creative minds will prevail here. Being creative is key to gaining getting a successful blog going. Everyone is creative, everyone has a unique twist to things, it’s just a matter of trusting yourself and doing it. Especially if it’s different and nobody has done it before. In a previous post, How to find Related Search Engine Terms, I give you an idea of how to find some popular keywords, I even gave you some of mine so you can just change it to fit your niche inside the wedding industry. For example, I am running a series of blog posts that pertain to a specific venue and adding what I do to it. Let me show you.. Now this may seem like something easy to come up with, but who do you know that’s doing it.. Nobody? I thought so.. Again Easy to do, it took some creative thinking on my side (patting myself on the back) and it has worked like a charm.

   Examples: Paraiso Marabilla Wedding DJ in Houston, Bella Terraza DJ Houston, and Sweetwater Country Club DJ.

   Whenever the people search for either of those venues my website comes up, whenever they look for a DJ that has DJ’ed that venue i should be one of the first websites to come up.

3. Install All in One SEO Pack for your Wordpress Blog.

   This one plugin for wordpress does all the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for you. You just install it and it does the rest. I’ve noticed about 20-30 more visitors to my website since I installed this tool. So all the keywords that I am targeting are getting ranked pretty well in google.com. Again, Search Engine Optimization is critical for getting your blog listed on the Search engines and this does EVERYTHING for you. Without this, the previous step is useless

4. BONUS TIP:

   Always, always, always… Aim to help someone with your experience. If your blog is not about helping others, it will never succeed no matter how far high in the search engines you get it. SEO is for the robots that crawl your webpage, but good, juicy, helpful content is for the readers that land on your site. Think of it this way, brides are absolutely clueless about weddings, if you give them a golden nugget that saves them time, saves them money, or saves them both… you will hold a place in their mind and fighting for mind space is what all marketers are aiming to do. Once you are in their mind as someone they can trust… you’ve made a happy customer.

Blogging success, like anything else, does not require a brain surgeon…err marketing guru, just a little work and determination. Follow the 3 tips above and you are on your way to reaching success through blogging.

Happy Bloggin!

–
DJ Francisco
Owner and Blogger of a Wedding DJ in Houston Blog

Start Bloggin’

So you’ve installed your blog on your website (hopefully)… Now What!?!?

To get started, you have to have a focus, an angle, a niche, a way to solve a problem so to speak. You have to find something that you can write and educate your readers about. Bloggin’ is all about solving the problems people have. At the meeting someone summed it all up, “Why do I want to read about someone’s day in the park?”

People really don’t want to read about that, they want to read to solve a particular problem.

For example, you will only read this blog if it solves your problem on how to integrate a blog to your business. If not, then you will probably not find it interesting, you won’t read it, and you won’t come back.

There are blogs about scrap booking, moms cooking and losing weight, dating advice for men, etc…

And then there are the professional Bloggers, the ones who make all their income through bloggin’

Yaro Starak : Entrepreneurs Journey, Darren Rowse : Pro BLogger, Brian Clark : CopyBlogger, and a few others. These bloggers make a healthy income, between $5,000 – $20,000 a month just from their blog. Now that’s motivation…

On a side note, I am a member of Yaro’s Blog Mastermind Group ( Blog for Profits Blueprint – Make money from your Blog ) and I’ve been a member since June of 2007. Membership is closed at this moment but will re-open to the public at a later time.

Getting started is the hardest part.

I remember when I first started bloggin’ I thought to myself. What will I write about? Who will read my blog? Who am I to start a blog? What will my friends think when they find out? Should I even tell them? I’m a math major, I suck at writing and expressing myself and people won’t understand me… and so on

And these are of course, the hardest things that I had to get over; my own stumbling blocks. At the time I really didn’t know where it was going, I just had read, from my initial Google.com search,that blogging was a great way to get your website to rank high on the search engines. I really didn’t know or understand how, but that’s what a lot of articles said so I said, what the heck let’s just try it.

It took me a while and it wasn’t easy, but I didn’t have anyone to guide me, I just did it.

A year later I achieved #1 in Google.com, Yahoo, and/or MSN for highly sought after keywords. Now I am content to be in the first page of the search results, which even that is hard to do.

Here are a few of the keywords:

1. DJ in Houston
2. Houston Wedding DJ
3. Quinceanera DJ
4. Bilingual DJ Houston
5. Wedding DJ in Houston

Why is this important???

I know it’s common sense, but let me elaborate. As a marketer, you soon learn that you have to put your brand in front of the bride as much as you can so that they can see your brand and recognize it. Jennifer preaches that a lot and you may even be tired of hearing it but that’s because to marketers that’s common sense but to us business owners, it’s not. It takes some repeating to get us to understand that concept, and that’s perfectly natural. We are worried about providing a great product or service more than anything.

Now-a-days the internet IS “the information super-highway” and it’s called that for a reason, if you need information on anything you just go to the internet and search for it. And that’s what brides are doing, they are searching for the best options on reception halls, on DJ’s, on photographers, etc… and if you are not on there, you are no one to them. Your website is on an island that they will never take the time to find. They are going with the top few and once they find one that is good enough.. they will book that service or buy that product.

Again this is stuff most people already know…

Stay Motivated:

Write what you love about and love what you write about. It’s as simple as that. That is the best way to keep up with your blog. You have to love your customers, and in bloggin’, your readers are your customers. Love them enough to be able to solve their problems. Help people with your accumulated experience! You own a business and have done your job a million times, that makes you the expert and brides want advice from experts, they want to know what to do and how to do it, or better yet how you will do it so they won’t have to worry about it. They will read your information, find it useful, and you’ll feel great about it. Not to mention that you will benefit by getting an extra event you would have never gotten had it not been for your blog.

Write with passion

In order to get brides to read your posts, you have to put some passion into them. If you are passionate about your job, then they will FEEL it when they read…

Put some EMPHASIS on words that you want to stick out or have meaning.

Use words that describe actions, people remember action if it’s detailed. For example…

The reception hall was elegantly covered with beige satin chair covers, the round tables had the same satin texture under chocolate brown table runners. Each table runner was precisely placed by the lady in a cross pattern

Now that took some time, effort, and pain to transfer an image in my head into the precise words that I thought would be a good example. Given my targeted audience, you (wedding vendors) you can probably see the same picture I saw. And it’s a lot more memorable than and descriptive than: The hall looked nice.

This should give you a good idea of how to get started bloggin’. Remember to get rid of your personal blocks, write to solve problems, stay motivated, and be passionate about your subject. You already are the expert in your field. Now you just need to transfer your experience, the experience you want to share and you know will help your brides, into words.

^Here’s to bloggin’!

–
Francisco Perez

Owner of the DJ in Houston Blog at www.fhpentertainment.com