Blogs - Search Engine Optimization and Online Marketing Help

SportsGuy gets a book deal.

Some of you may know that I post at various forums under the handle SportsGuy (or sportsguy). I moderate at www.searchengineforums.com, I help out at the small business forums at www.searchengineguide.com and I try to help as often as possible over at www.ihelpyou.com and www.searchenginewatch.com.

In fact, I recently signed a contract with SEW to write some articles for them on in-house SEM and how to build the team effectively.

Now, only a few folks know that I’ve been pursuing a book deal for the past year or so.

It all began when, in a moment of venting that I’m sure all mods have, I made a comment in the staff area at SEF. I said, “I should just write a book on the basics of optimizing and monetizing a website for everyone.” Common questions were getting me down.

Another staffer said, “Why not?”

After some soul searching and some of the best advice I’ve ever received, (Anyone can write an e-book, but to land a book deal means you actually know your stuff.) I decided to contact a book agent.

If you’ve never tried to get a book deal before, it’s a daunting task.

First you pitch the book agent, usually via an online form and by answering specific questions. It’s pretty in depth but helps them weed out the good from the bad. Even choosing an agent is a tough task. I went with a recommendation from a friend and I’m glad I did.

The book agent contacted me back in November of 2005 saying she liked my idea and wanted to pitch it to some publishers.

Fast forward to today and the project is a go. I got the offer last night (advances, it turns out, are NOT urban legends!). The project has evolved a lot since I started it. The initial focus of the book has changed slightly, I have a co-author on-board who’s already a published author, we haggled on the name a bit with the publisher, etc.

But now, McGraw Hill/Osborne has sent us an offer. The final draft is due by June 1st, 2007 and they even suggested how many pages the book should be…LOL

So, this all means that by September-ish I should have a book on store shelves. Very cool.

The focus of the book is building blogs and monetizing them. Since I’ve done it, I figured I’d talk about it.

So, there we go - I have a book deal. Very freakin’ cool, IMO!

Huge thanks go out to those who started me thinking of this project and the those who got my head straight on whether to even pursue it.

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Tags: Blogs, Blog Books, Book Deal by searchgeek
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Promoting your blog

By posting to social bookmarking services and the like. OK, here’s a crash course - down and dirty. It’s meant to give you a basic overview of what to do, rather than be a point-by-point workbook. So, we’ll assume you have a functioning blog. You know how to post articles and maintain the thing. What you want is to increase the exposure of your articles and the blog itself. Well, have you submitted to the main blog directories? Do a quick search for “blog directory” and you’ll find several sources to submit your blog to (list at the bottom of this post). Very much like Yahoo’s directory, these spaces exist to catalogue blogs only. Some will pass PR values, some won’t, some cost money to get a listing in, most are free. Some directories will list you immediately, some may take a few weeks to get to your submission.In any event, it’s worth getting these listings. In almost every case you’ll need to add a small bit of code to your site - which usually amounts to showing a small, linked image form the directory or service. Nothing to worry about. Drop the code into your sidebar or footer and be done with it. Next up, you’ll be looking to get going on social bookmarking (I’ll explain the two main types below). This basically amounts to you spreading the word at a grass-roots type level. You’ll be checking in with many different services to let them know about your latest articles/posts. There are two main types of places you’ll be looking to get posts into:1 - places like Netscape - the news aggregators who take articles/feeds and show them to users who have accounts2 - social bookmarking services - these folks act as big file cabinets for your links - so any page you see, you click a button in your toolbar and the page is automatically bookmarked with them. Now, no matter where you are, just log into that one account and you’ll be able to access your bookmarks. …and you’ll be able to share them with other users of the same service - so posting links to your articles increases their exposure…Each service varies slightly in how they let you submit items, but the basics are this: 1 - you get an account (free) 2 - you submit the URL for the article 3 - you enter a description of the article and drop in some keyword tags 4 - you hit the submit buttonNow, it’s critical to remember something at this point:These services DO NOT exist to act as an advertising medium for your site.So, that means you’ll want to submit items that come from sources other than your own blog. That’s right, and on various topics as well. if you try to submit only items you’ve created, you’ll get tagged as a spammer and your IP will most likely be blocked. Play nice and you’ll be fine. With the bookmarking services, this is a bit less of a concern, but each service has it’s own limits so follow any posted rules carefully. Now, there are well over 50 of these spaces you can post to, so how do you manage them all? Sure you can take all the buttons and add them to your toolbar then click each button over and over, but there’s a better, slightly faster way to manage this stuff.

The Socializer helps you by allowing you to submit to almost all of these services from one space. Drop their button into your toolbar, go to a page, hit the “Socialize this” button, and start submitting. You’ll still need to click on each of the services you want to submit to, and each service will want some unique info like tags, but it’s a quicker way to manage the multiple postings of the same article, to different services. It takes me about 10 minutes to post an article across the top 12 services and the results are worth it.

Remember:
1 - you’ll still need to have an active account with each of the services you want to submit to, so it’ll take time, once, to open them all - make sure you’re able to accept cookies on your PC too, or it won’t work.
2 - post about more than just yourself
3 - keep up the pace - 3 - 4 times each week make the rounds and post unique stuff
Finally, be sure that you have your “pings” enabled. This function allows you to ping each service you list when you post a new article. It’s important because it help spread the word yet again. Just be careful you’re not posting the same article multiple times to the same service. Typically, each service will give you a URL to add to your ping list. Follow your blog platforms instructions for updating this list and get those URLs in there.

So, there we go - get the blog submitted to the blog directories then get your social experience moving.