Bowensthinks

You’ve seen me and thousands of other marketers talk about how to make a blog popular. But if you don’t set up your blog correctly, you won’t do well no matter what kind of marketing you do. And no, I am not talking about the technical setup of your blog . I am talking about the foundation. From what you are blogging about, to how you structure your content… there are a lot of basics people get wrong . And if you get them wrong, it’s going to be that much harder to get more traffic (and more importantly monetize the traffic). So, if I had to start a blog from scratch again, here are the principles I would follow before even writing my first blog post: Principle #1: Pick a big enough niche Unless you are well funded, you have to pick a niche. It’s too hard to compete on a broad level with sites like Huffington Post and Business Insider. They well funded and are able to produce huge amounts of content from contributors big and small. And if your niche is too small, it will be hard...

In the past, I broke down the most vital SEO strategy I learned , which came from a Google employee. This time I thought I would do something similar and share the 7 biggest SEO lessons that I learned from a Google employee. Some of these things you may already know, but most you probably aren’t too familiar with. And of course, I am not telling you anything that would jeopardize my relationship or the career of the Google employee. So here goes, these are the 7 biggest SEO lessons I learned from a Google employee. Lesson #1: Penalizations and bans don’t work the way most people think Google’s goal isn’t to penalize sites. Their goal is to serve the most relevant listing to each searcher. For example, if BMW had a handful of bad links pointing to it or they were caught building links, it could be foolish to ban or penalize BMW. The reason being is that  BMW is a popular brand … there are millions of people each year who search for the term “BMW.” See, the average person do...

Everyone’s saying it… video is the future of content marketing! But is it really? Similar to you, I noticed that trend over a year ago, and I decided to listen to everyone who told me to focus on videos instead of just text-based content. I even wrote a blog post about how I was shifting my content marketing budgets over to podcasting and videos . But, as you know, opinions don’t really matter in marketing. If the data shows something is working you should do more of it. And if the data shows the opposite, then you need to reconsider what you are doing. So, was YouTube really worth it for me? Neil, you’re on YouTube? If you haven’t already seen my YouTube videos, you can check them out here (they are the same videos I also put on my blog). And if you have seen my videos, you’ll notice that I have a ton of them. I started posting on YouTube a bit more than a year and a half ago and have already uploaded 347 videos so far. That’s a lot of content! The videos all vary in lengt...

Have you heard the saying, “content is king?” Well, of course, you have. But creating more content won’t necessarily get you more search traffic. You’ve heard people like me mention stats like the average piece of content that ranks on page one of Google  contains 1,890 words. But that doesn’t mean writing in-depth content that is 1,890 words will automatically get you more search traffic. It just means that the average web page on page 1 contains that many words. I bet you are going through the scenario below… You keep writing content but, for some reason, you aren’t getting the amount of search traffic that you would like to be getting. Don’t worry, I know what you are going through, and I will tell you the solution. But first, let’s go over how content marketing is changing. Over 440 million blogs exist The latest stat I could find on the web is that there are currently  440 million blogs . But if you consider Medium and Tumblr (and other similar sites), that n...