Building Backlinks to .edu Blogs
Building backlinks to .edu blogs is one sure way to increase the ‘opinion’ that Google has of you when your site is crawled by the Google spiders. .edu sites have more of an authority value than a regular .com site, so not only will you get the kudos for having a backlink in the first place, it will be magnified by it being a .edu link. You want Google’s opinion of your site to be the best it can, so that you result better in search results.
Some SEO gurus even say that the value of one .edu backlink is worth 20 standard backlinks. Google is now apparently judging links on whether they are in the same niche, and if they are, then more value is given to the link. So today, I’m going to show you how to find .edu sites to link to in a particular niche. Not to mention, we haven’t covered any SEO at all on this blog yet.
So to attain some .edu backlinks you will need to follow this next section. Let’s start with an example: if your website is in the sporting niche, you would type the following into your google search area:
site:.edu blog sport
You can then view all the blogs that Google has with an .edu suffix in the sports niche. I then prefer to refine the results by clicking down the left hand side of the page on the option More search tools.
Then I select Past 24 hours so that I am presented with recently updated blogs. I don’t want the old blogs to post on, for one I don’t know if they are in operation anymore, and for two it could well mean that people are not moderating comments on those blogs anymore.
That’s another thing too, some of these comments areas will give you a ‘follow’ and some won’t. Having a mixture of ‘dofollows’ and ‘nofollows’ will aid your linking strategy.
So now, if you make relevant and interesting posts under any blog posts that you find that allow comments, you can benefit from the work by Google. Keep in mind that the IT departments of some of these education establishments are getting more savvy by the day, and they know that .edu is sought after backlink, so you really will have to write something that they will approve.
Good luck with it and let me know how you get on.
Articles I came across this week that I found interesting – hope you find something useful in there for you.
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5 Reasons Readers Like Numbers in a Headline
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Reach Customers in 140 Characters, All of Them Free
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Bloggers, Are You Building Your Assets
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How to Search Engine Optimise Your Facebook Fan Page
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The Secret to Growing Your Blog Twice as Fast
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How to Monetize Your Site Without Causing an Audience Revolt
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The Secret Sauce that Makes Facebook’s News Feed Tick
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Majority of Adults Now Google Themselves [Study] - google your business
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Search Engines the New Marketing Frontier
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12 Charts That Show Why the BRICs will Utterly Dominate the Next Decade
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If you didn’t think there was such a thing as free international publicity for your small business – you’re about to be proven wrong.
HARO offers free publicity for small businesses from their website helpareporter.com.
It all started when 10 years ago, Peter Shankman started a PR firm and regularly matched reporters with people who could be interviewed or quoted for published articles. He has now founded helpareporter.com which offers free publicity for small businesses.
When you sign up you will receive emails daily with all reporter’s requests. Respond quickly and succinctly to gain the most chance of the reporter using you. Approximately 150 requests a day are received from reporters with over 30,000 reporters having signed up.
Overall a great public relations tool for even a one man company to get into global publications.
HARO have a fan page on Facebook where you can read success stories of small businesses. They are also available via twitter.
As successful small business owners are fully aware, small businesses don’t take off overnight. They take a lot of nurturing and time and effort. I recently read a newspaper article with quotes from entrepreneurs whose businesses had performed so well that they were being nominated for national awards. One of the quotes was about giving it your all and giving up your social life. Personally I recognise that, and have had to stop a lot of my social life myself.
Success takes a lot of focus, commitment and thinking. Many times when I go to bed at night I’m thinking about what I can post about that will give value to the readers. No doubt you go through the same motions too.
My days at IBM in my twenties taught me a lot, with my own commitment and that of my colleagues and where it would get us in comparison to those whose commitment was a little more flakey. In today’s post I want to share with you some personal insights that I have learnt myself and from others and feel are important values of successful business people.
1. Write a plan and stick to it – write an action plan of how you are going to reach your destination. Write measurable and precise goals ie 5 local newspaper mentions this year. Then as you go through the year, if you get to May and you haven’t got one yet, you know exactly what you need to do. Everyday you can see what you need to do and it will keep you on track. A goal that isn’t written down is just thin air. In my 45 free lessons for small business marketing, I will be providing you with an easy to use template that I use to record my goals and track my progress. It is something that pins my business together.
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2. Know that you will not have success overnight – it takes a lot of work. Within a year you would have made so much progress you will surprise yourself if you take action on your plan everyday.
3. Take responsibility for your life – as time goes by it seems that our society is leaning more towards supporting a ‘blame culture’. I don’t feel this is good for society nor is it a habit that helps with business. Having a ‘victim mentality’ is not something that leads to success.
4. Opinions are only opinions after all – and there are as many opinions on this planet as there are people ie 6 billion. If you get a bad rap for something, just move on and don’t take it personally. It is just an opinion after all. Consider whether the person giving it to you is actually an expert, if so, learn something from it, if not then just keep your head down working and keep moving. Customer feedback is another matter and should be taken seriously if you are not delivering a decent service or products.
5. You are going to have to work hard – yes, and it may be that you have to give up your social life if you really do want a successful business. Businesses take time to grow and develop and they need a lot of commitment and thinking. Be willing to pay the price for your dreams. Wanting a big house, a luxury car, and a million dollars in the bank is all very nice, and everyone wants these things – but are you willing to pay the price to get them? This is one of the major differences between the successful and unsuccessful.
6. Stay focused – it may be that you have to turn your phone off during the day if the calls you are getting are not business related. Keep to the task at hand and blank out whatever it is that is distracting you. If you work from home and you need to re-educate your family on when it is ok to interrupt you, then do that. A corporation in Japan had red hats as part of their business strategy and culture. If a worker was wearing a red hat then it was focus time and nobody could interrupt him. Do the same at home and put a sign on your office door for when you are not available. You can get a lot done in 4 hours of uninterrupted work time. If need be, set a timer and stay focused until the buzzer sounds. Keep away from your email and other unnecessary distractions.
7. Never give up – the Indian saying ‘you can’t eat an elephant in one day’ is true. You need to focus and then go an inch at a time towards your destination. It won’t all just suddenly fall into place like magic, you’ve got to work hard to take there an inch at a time. If you get turned away by anybody, remember Edison the inventor of the lightbulb who quoted “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”
8. Strive to be the best that you can – learn all that you can about your field of business and grow your knowledge everyday. Make a note of what you can do better and take customer feedback seriously. If possible give yourself an appraisal every year on areas of your business and then measure where you are. Next year measure again.
9. The power of now – do it today – not tomorrow. Get on with it now. You need to get as much done as you can and you have a long way to go.
I hope that you find those helpful, I certainly have done.
Following are the top 10 essential online tasks of small business marketing.
Last week, somebody who I met in social media world asked me what my top 10 marketing tips were from my book. This has inspired me to write this post. The following are tasks that I feel every business should attend to in order to commence their online marketing campaign.
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1. Create your elevator speech
Creating your elevator speech is essential so that you give a concise and consistent message as to what your business provides or sells in your marketing efforts.
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2. Ensure that the signature on your email is current and useful.
This is one of your marketing techniques that is free to use and can bring you extra traffic to your website. Even if you don’t have a website yet just include your contact details. Also include the following:
- Facebook profile link (for example mine is http://www.facebook.com/amelia.champion) You can find it by clicking on your profile and taking the url from the address bar on your web browser. It is best to take this address when you have first logged in. It’s possible that it may give you extra characters or words in the address, but just remove them so that the result is an address similar to mine but with your own name. Test that you have the right address by typing it into a new browser window.
- Twitter ID
- telephone no.
- tagline (use either this post – How to Create a Tagline or Lesson 1 Elevator Pitch to help create this)
- Linked-In profile
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3. Create a Facebook fan page for your business
- Here is the link to create a fanpage.
- Add a profile picture, whatever information that you can including your elevator pitch and a link to your website.
- make a first entry on your page such as ‘Welcome to your company name fanpage.
- Suggest the page to your friends and contacts
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4. Create a Twitter ID
- go to twitter.com and sign-up creating an ID that is related to your company name
- add a background – unless you are experienced with graphics, you might prefer to use mytweetspace.com which provides a tool to create your own backgrounds with text
- obtain followers - to start getting followers, I suggest that you follow a few people in your field - use Geofollow which is a location based twitter directory. You can then be sure to find companies within your area. If it is not important with your business model to find your clientele from a particular location, then you can search using a keyword related to your business.
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5. Add your business to local business directories
- use local directories such as yelp.com, google maps, Bing, you can find more on my post about promoting your business locally
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6. Create a blog
Search engines love blogs because their content is often fresh and that is one of the points that they grade websites on and how important they are. Having a blog is also a good way to bring new awareness about your business and it can instill some loyalty in your customers as it’s an opportunity for them to get to know more about you. Customers will especially appreciate your blog if you provide them with some useful information that helps them.
One essential task of having a blog is to keep blogging. Even if you only do this only once per week, it is something that needs to be done. Otherwise your blog will appear like a ‘ghost town’ with nobody home.
To create a blog, you can create one for free on WordPress.com or Blogger.com for freely hosted, or install WordPress software from WordPress.org onto your website. If your website is hosted by godaddy.com you will be able to install it from the backend.
Before investing the time and effort into a blog, find out the advantages and disadvantages of free hosted sites and having your own blog that you host yourself. I’ll cover this in my Free 45 Lessons of Small Business Marketing series.
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7. Get a LinkedIn profile
Having a profile on Linked-In is now a strong marketing tool for small businesses and for individuals. It can be used in many ways to promote your business.
- complete your profile as much as possible
- add a link to your Linked-In profile from your email signature and to your Facebook profile or fan page
- join industry or location business groups or start your own and invite your contacts
- network within the groups and provide useful comments and information when you can
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8. Use Alexa.com
If you already have a website or blog, visit alexa.com to see where you are in the big picture. Alexa gives a ranking to each website and using this ranking will give you some idea of how well you are doing with promoting it. You can also use google analytics or statcounter.com to monitor your visitors and see which pages or links they are coming from.
Alexa has a toolbar that provides useful information and links. As a benefit, it can also improve your own website Alexa rank. To make the most of this, install the toolbar on all the computers in your building with your website or blog as the homepage. This will boost your rankings. Here is a link to install the toolbar.
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9. Foursquare
If you are unaware of Foursquare, read my post on how it is helping small businesses . Add your business to Foursquare and if you have a bar or restaurant then you give ‘specials’ such as a free drink to the most frequent customer, or think of a special that would work and be appropriate for your business.
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10. Study the websites of your competitors
Take a look at the successful websites or blogs of your competitors and see what you can learn.
- What do you think works well on their site?
- How do you think they are getting their visitors?
- What do they post about and what type of writing or voice do they use?
- How often are they posting and who are they directing their posts at?
- Study what keywords they are using by going to their homepage and clicking on View, Page Source on Firefox and on Internet Explorer, click on the left hand mouse button and Select View, Page Source.
Do you have your own top 10 essential marketing tasks that you want to add to the comments area below?
Welcome to the first of 45 free lessons on how to market your small business.
Each post will take the form of some theory and guidance followed by a task.
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What is an elevator pitch?
An elevator pitch is an overview of your business that can be conveyed within 30 seconds (30-80 words) during the ride of an elevator. It should leave your listener wanting to know more. Elevator pitches can be written for products, people or businesses.
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Why would you want an elevator pitch?
There are a variety of advantages in defining your elevator pitch or mission of your small business and much of your marketing efforts will be based around this. Without one there is a chance to miss out on vital opportunities for business when you network and it’s very easy to miss the point with your marketing copy.
Imagine unexpectedly meeting a hot prospect at the gym or in the mall and him or her asking you what you do. This is your prime chance to tell them, and you don’t want to leave yourself in a position where you are not prepared to make the most of this opportunity. Remember the proverb ‘He who fails to prepare, prepares to fail.’
Even if you don’t feel like you need to do this with your business, if you haven’t done it already, go through the exercise anyway just to cement your mission again. There could well be something that you learn from this that hasn’t been obvious in the past.
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Advantages of defining the elevator pitch
- you will be fully prepared and will know what to say if for example you meet an old friend or if an unexpected business opportunity arises in conversation
- you will be crystal clear about what you business is about – and this is at the core of all of your marketing efforts
- business cards, email signatures, profiles, articles and your about page will all have clarity
- easier to create your tagline
- it will be easier to write content for your website or blog
- optimising your site for the search engines and gaining traffic will be improved if you know what your keywords are and who you are writing for
- media contact will be improved
- business partners and other bloggers will have clarity
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How to Define Your Elevator Pitch
Solve a problem or need - basically the internet is a huge answer machine. Which questions and needs will your business answer?
Who are your audience - what is your demographic? Consider what they need to know.
Why would your client choose your business or want to know about it – what will they get from you or how?
Be clear and precise - don’t leave people wondering what you mean.
Be passionate and convey some energy
If possible inject some humor or personality into your pitch.
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And once you have your pitch?
What else do people need to know – ready yourself with the next level of information so that if people ask more, you already have it ready.
Write your pitch on a card and keep it handy next to your computer.
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Example of an elevator pitch
I’m not a big McDonalds fan, but I thought I’d use them for the example of an elevator pitch. It could no doubt be improved with a touch of humour or personality injected.
For people who are in hurry, McDonalds provide food quickly for a small budget, with a selection of meals for children and adults, even for those with a preference for healthy choices.
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Task: Write your pitch
Once you have done this print it out. You may also want to look for opportunities to include it in your blog or material. Keep it handy at all times when you are working.
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Please do add it to the comments below – it’s another marketing opportunity and a backlink to your site after all!
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Each week I will send out a link list of must reads for Small Business Marketing.
Here are some posts that I came across this week that I found useful and interesting. I’d like to share them with you in the hope that you will find something of interest too.
Everything You Need to Know About Social Media that You Should Have Learned in Pre-School
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20 Easy Ways to Ruin Your Blog
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11 Smart Tips for Brilliant Writing
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Links Your SMB Can Easily Snatch Up
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Write Your Business Plan in Pencil
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10 Local SEO and Online Marketing Tips
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Small Business Owners Adopting Social Media in 2010
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5 Hot Summer Marketing Tips for Small Businesses
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Foursquare is Awesome for My Small Business
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Kevin Rose’s 10 Tips for Entrepreneurs
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The fact is Foursquare may have only 16 employees but it’s certainly something to take note of. The location-based social network tool that allows you to ‘check-in’ from your mobile device is putting small businesses on the map and is likely to be another ‘Twitter’ in terms of popularity.
To give you some idea of the way that Foursquare is coming up through the ranks be aware that during this year’s SXSW festival (the interactive film and media festival) in Austin, Texas it was used over 1,000,000 times by people ‘checking-in’ to different events. Observations that I have made regarding the rise of Foursquare as a social media tool to take note of is that just last week Foursquare was featured on “The Today Show” on CNN and it also has it’s own category alongside Facebook and Twitter on the knowledgeable Mashable blog.
Foursquare are now working with small businesses to understand how they can help them more. A dashboard has been provided with analytics to understand how many visitors businesses have per day, the most active time of day, who their most frequent visitors are and a gender breakdown. This type of information can help with retaining customers and gaining new ones. Loyalty discounts and specials can be used to encourage frequent visitors who provide small business with free advertising over their twitter and facebook profiles as their ‘check-ins’ are broadcast.
To learn more about Foursquare’s business visit the Foursquare + business page.
How to Create a Tagline for your Business
If you have ever wondered how to create a tagline or even why you would want to, here is something to ponder. Creating a tagline is essential for your business. Not only does is it a marketing tool that can state clearly on your marketing efforts what you are about, but it is a chance to stand out from the crowd and let them know what you do differently. It’s especially important if it isn’t obvious what your business does from the name.
To create something that will work for you, keep these points in mind:
- be clear about the purpose of your business
- what value are you offering to the customer ?
- what is something special that makes you stand out from others?
- how can you get your message across in a clear and precise way that won’t leave others wondering what you mean?
- be passionate and convey some energy if possible
For example for a bakery, you might choose something along the lines of: Fresh hot breads that make your mouth water.
This tagline brings across the fact that you supply breads, that they are made on the premises most likely otherwise they would not be hot and fresh and that they taste so good they make your mouth water.
Places that you will use your tagline are:
- your blog header
- your email signature
- forum profile signatures
- your business card
- your website about page
- any paper products that you use such as receipts, envelopes, letterheaded paper
In my next post we will look at the why and hows of creating your elevator pitch.
44 Free Online Tools for Small Business Owners List
This list of 44 FREE online tools will help small business owners keep their costs down until they have a software budget. I use many of these tools everyday to keep my business running to help me make money online.
Blogs and content
Google Reader-keep up to date with the best content on the web. Google reader is an RSS feed reader so that whenever a new blog is published, you can receive the latest posts once you have signed up by subscription. 
Google Alerts – an automatic service that will send you any mentions of a keyword. You can also use it to monitor when there are new mentions of the name of your site or even yourself. It can also be used to monitor forums so that whenever a question is asked in your niche, you can go right to the question and be one of the first to answer it, resulting in more traffic to your site.
Blogger.com – create a free blog in seconds and you can gain traffic from Blogger’s directory that you will be listed in automatically. Beware that you won’t have full ownership of your blog though, you will need to buy a domain name and hosting for that.
WordPress – another free blog service, this one has plenty of features in the form of widgets, stats and different themes available.
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Collaboration / Sharing workspaces
Google docs – not only does this tool provide storage for your documents, they can be edited by your colleagues and peers so that you can just keep one version on the go at a time.
Exploratree – use these ready made interactive thinking guides to analyse issues or brainstorm ideas with your team. Even available in Welsh.
Scriblink – use a whiteboard and invite others to work with you by sending them the URL. You can save and print the results.
Mentat – a todo list that can be used individually or for teams. Keep on top of your shopping list or on a computer bug. Can be used by Blackberry too.
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Communicate
Skype – the popular VOIP telephone system that has chat, file sending and now a new video conferencing feature for up to 5 people. Cheap calls to landlines and free computer to computer calls.
LinkedIn – build your network and catch up with past acquaintances on this powerful networking tool. Forums and groups enable you to network with others in your niche.
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Copyright
Copyscape – you can use this to check to see if anybody has copied content from your webpage and to put an ominious warning with a Copyscape banner on your page.
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Documentation
PDFill – PDF files are often seen as the standard for electronic documentation. This free tool offers editing, forms, drawing, annotation and saving without needing to use the file’s ‘mother’ Adobe Acrobat.
PDFSam – an opensource tool for merging and splitting PDF files. Good for merging large files together, that other editors don’t seem to be able to handle.
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Files including storage
Zamzar – use this online tool to convert files from one format to another without having to download anything. Good for ebooks, images and music files.
Filezilla – free ftp software that I use to upload to my websites. Very easy to use and you can keep the login information registered for quick and easy access.
Gigasize – a great free tool to send large files online. For free you can store up to 600 mb for 45 days too.
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Forums
Big-boards - Big-Boards is a directory of the busiest forums online. You can filter through to find your niche and start networking immediately.
And check out Linked-In for this too. They are very strong on their forums.
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Images
Gimp – Gimp is a fantastic image tool that has almost as many features as photoshop but you don’t have to spend out. I use it for resizing my images as it’s very easy to use.
Picresize – another image resizing tool that is easy to use and web based.
Stock.XCHNG – if you need images to spruce up your webpages, visit this site that supplies images that are mostly royalty-free.
Picasa – Google’s downloadable image gallery with tools for minor editing and online album building. A must for people with a lot of images.
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Invoicing
Invoicejournal – send as many invoices as you like to your customers with this brandable free service.
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Marketing / Promotion of your content / backlinks
Stumbleupon toolbar – using this free toolbar can bring you more traffic by hitting on the little ‘thumbs up’ icon. You can network and make friends and then they may stumble your posts and build up your traffic.
Onlywire – with the click of one button, you can send out your blog content or any other web page to over 30 different sites – good aid for backlinks and promotion for your site.
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Organisation
RememberTheMilk – an online to-do list that will email you, send you an SMS text message or mark them onto your google calendar. You can even share the tasks.
Wesabe – this online tool gives you guidance on how you are spending your money. It will also give you advice on where you can save, how and has coupons available. Reach your financial goals with the help of the Wesabe community.
GTDInbox – turn your Gmail emails into to do tasks so that you can have better control over your email. The product’s mantra is ‘in-box zero’ and email overload is a thing of the past.
Scheduly – allow your clients to schedule appointments with you from your free slots online with just one click.
Mindomo – organise your thoughts with this mind-mapping program that will allow you 7 mindmaps under the free trial. I think mind-maps can be very useful to organise marketing strategies and business plans.
Wisemapping – another mind-mapping tool that is completely free.
Clickbook – ideal for massage therapists, hairdressers or anybody who takes appointments or has many meetings this tool will take the place of a receptionist and you won’t have to call anybody back.
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SEO
Good Keywords – this download that aids your keyword research. The site also provides some educational material about how to choose keywords, but it is a little out of date now.
Google Analytics – check your web site statistics with this tool, you can check visitor numbers and their behaviour on your site.
Alexa.com – useful resource to find out information on sites, they have a great tool that will tell you where a site is on the Alexa ranking scale. Also tells you who owns a site, the top sites and
Traffic Travis – Traffic Travis is one of my favourite tools. It is a free download and you can find out how many people are searching on a particular keyword in Google, Bing and Yahoo, and then you can also discover how easy it will be for you to compete against your competitors. I just love it.
SEO Book Keyword Tool – to perform well in the search engine results pages (SERPS) then this tool will aid with keyword selection and it uses Wordtracker. One of my favourites too and the site has free SEO tutorials.
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Following trends
ebay pulse – check to see what is hot on ebay with this tool that will show you the top searches. You can check what people want to buy. Remember all these buyers have money they’re willing to spend.
Blog Pulse – track conversations in blogs and keywords over time with this tool.
Google Trends- Google trends is a fantastic tool that will allow you to compare a keyword over a period of time and see if it’s gaining in popularity.
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Video
Camstudio – this tool can make desktop videos for you to share on youtube. A very powerful marketing tool.
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Making or hosting web sites
Alleycode – a free html editor that gives good results. I use Dreamweaver as that was my first experience with html code tools. However alleycode does the trick.
Weebly – if you want a quick website online, Weebly can do this for you. It has a drag and drop design dashboard and will host it for you – all for free.
Squidoo – this is not a tool to make a website, but pages that you make will perform very well in the search engines and you can use them to link back to your own site or to sell your products. There is also a feature that will earn you money for yourself or as a contribution for your favourite charity.
Hubpages – again not a website for yourself but pages, but this again performs very well in the search engine result pages as the search engines seem to like it’s good page ranking. Use to bring traffic to your own site from sharing something.
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Writing
Thesaurus – this tool will tell you synonyms for words and it has a dictionary feature in case you need to check how a word is spelt.
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