Ehud Furman asked:


Tips to Establish an Online Presence – Blogging

Your Google CV is vitally important to your online brand and as a result you will need to strive to occupy as many of the listings on page one of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) as possible. There are a variety of ways to achieve this and we will be looking at a new set of tips to help you establish and heighten your online presence each week.

A Quick Look at Blogging

Derived from the word weblog, a blog is essentially a website that sports continuously updated information in the form of posts that are displayed in reverse chronological order. Typically a blog will sport the following features: content area, title, comment area, an archive of older posts and a feed which users can use to subscribe to it.

A blog allows individuals the opportunity to foster an online identity, engage with a community and establish themselves as experts in a given arena. Blogs enable you to participate in conversations taking place in your industry or area of specialisation as well as allow you to build your own voice – all the while heightening your web presence.

To promote yourself online via blogging you will need to implement a solid blog strategy. Think about the goals you want your blog to achieve and ensure that each post is geared at achieving them. But remember, a blog can not be a purely promotional tool – if readers wanted information on you or your offering exclusively they’d visit your website.

Better Blogging Tips

There are millions of blogs in existence with new blogs being launched every second. But not all blogs are created equally, in fact more than half of the blogs launched don’t make it past the first three months. If you are serious about utilising blogging to establish an online presence, you will need to make a commitment to do just that. Blogging does take work, but the rewards are worth it.

In order to make sure that your blog is attracting readers and that its profile (and by association yours) is being raised daily, you’ll need to pay special attention to the flowing tips for better blogging.

Promote your blog – With millions of blogs in existence, you’ll need to promote your blog in order to attract readers. There are many ways in which you can promote your blog. Listing your blog in blog directories like Blog Hub, Technorati and Bloglisting is a good start.

Using your preferred social networking or business networking site is another excellent way of alerting your friends, colleagues and clients to the existence of your blog and where they can find it. Your blog will be tied in to your professional self – the “you” that you want potential clients, invertors or employers to meet. If you are in the online marketing game, a link to your blog which details your daily TV viewing habits should be scrapped in favour of a blog which offers insight into your industry.

Participate – Conversation is key to blogging. You need to not only participate with your audience, but with other bloggers operating in your sphere too. By leaving insightful comments on other blogs the authors, or their readers, may follow the link back to your blog and if they like what they see chances are that they will come back.

Frequency – Posting too often may overwhelm readers and posting too infrequently may mean that your readers will come back, find nothing new and as a result not come back again. A post a day is ideal, but very few individuals have that kind of time on their hands. Try for at least three new posts each week.

Good content – How many times have you heard that content is king – well, it’s true as long as it’s good content. If your readers are gaining value by visiting your blog and if you are giving them what they are looking for they will come back. Use the feedback you receive via the comments in order to tailor posts to your audience. You can also introduce features, like our weekly online promotion tips. It’s important to try things out and re-evaluate your blog strategy as you go.

SEO – Search engine optimisation is an eMarketing tactic which sees bloggers and website owners optimising their sites for certain search phrases in order to get their sites listed as high up on the SERPs as possible. You may want to conduct some key phrase research and ensure that your posts target those pages. The higher up you are on the SERPs the more likely searchers are to find your blog. Keep an eye out on our blog for future posts that will guide you through the process of utilising SEO to build your online presence.

Monitor – The sheer amount of consumer generated media has made online reputation monitoring essential. Ensure that you are tracking what is being said about you online so that you can be aware and respond accordingly.

Good luck and happy blogging!

About the Author

By allowing you to create or improve your online presence, Lookup Page can help you to take control of your Google CV and start branding yourself online. Visit the blog for more tips on how to build your Google CV and increase your online visibility.

Phyllis Zimbler Miller asked:


If you’ve optimized your Amazon profile, including choosing an Amazon signature that appears every time you post a book review on Amazon, you’re ready to move to the second stage of optimizing yourself and your book on Amazon. And this second stage starts with your book’s page on Amazon.

Your Book’s Amazon Page

First, check that your name is spelled correctly and the product info is correct. If your co-author was left off or there are other errors, scroll down the page to “update book info” and do so.

Second, if you have a blog and you have entered your blog feed into your Amazon account, your blog posts will automatically appear on your book’s page.

Now let’s look at a basic opportunity. Does your Amazon book page offer the LOOK INSIDE feature? If not, ask your publisher to provide this to Amazon.

Next, is your book available in a Kindle format? If your publisher doesn’t automatically provide this format, do so yourself. You can follow the instructions on the Amazon site – scroll down your book’s page until you see this headline “Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store.” Or you can supply the version yourself. (If you do have someone create the digital version of your book, make sure that this version is optimized. Otherwise you’ll have a digital version that is very hard to read.)

Obviously you want to get as many good reviews for your book as possible. This can be achieved in a variety of ways. One way: If you take a virtual book tour on book blogs and get good reviews, you can ask the book bloggers who gave you good reviews to also put their reviews on your book’s Amazon page. And there are many book bloggers who offer to review books even if you’re not on a virtual book tour.

A second way: You can ask your friends to read your book and post good reviews. (If a friend doesn’t like your book, don’t ask him/her to post a review.) A third way: Look for reviewers on Amazon who have written good reviews of similar books to yours. Then contact those reviewers if you can find their contact info.

A fourth way should be considered with caution: There are book review companies that offer book reviews for a fee. It’s probably best to get recommendations from other authors rather than randomly choosing such review companies.

Under “Tags Customers Associate with This Product” you’ll find “your tags.” You can add a tag for your book and then you will be asked to write a brief reason why the tag is relevant for your book. Amazon then reviews your reason for the tag and decides if the suggested tag is appropriate for your book.

You can write an article on your own book under “Product Information from the Amapedia Community.” You can read Amazon’s explanation of Amapedia – but for now think of it as a Wikipedia-type entry about your book.

Also on your book’s page you can “Create a Listmania! list” (instructions included) that can turn up on other book pages with your Amazon signature included with the list

Or on your page you can “Create a guide” for the “So You’d Like to …” feature. Again, the benefit for an author of doing the work to create the guide is that the guide will turn up on other book pages with your Amazon signature.

Other Book Pages

And, of course, you can get exposure by posting reviews on other book pages. Your Amazon signature will automatically appear at the top of your review, and you can manually include a signature at the end of the review. These can be the same signature or different signatures.

The more reviews you do on Amazon the more places that people can run across your name and the title of your book. If people like the way you write reviews, they may be more inclined to be interested in your own book.

Yes, writing reviews of books you’ve read does take time. And doing the other Amazon optimizer techniques in this article also takes time. Yet, if you’ve spent all that time writing a book, it makes sense to optimize your book’s Amazon presence. Who knows who might discover you online?