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Is there a “secret technique” that will allow your blog post to rise above the multitudes of other blog posts and climb the Google results ladder?

Actually, yes there is.

And it’s really not that big of a secret, it’s just that most people don’t take the time to implement a strategy.

A blog post strategy will make a big difference in your results.

To start with, your blog post is about something. You know what it’s about, but do the search engines? You need to make sure that Google, Yahoo, and Bing all can figure out what your post is about. I recently heard several comments on this subject and everyone was in agreement on a few basic techniques for making your blog post stand out.

First of course is the title. Put you main keyword or keyword phrase in the title, and try to get it front-loaded in the title as well. For example if your blog post is about bird watching, you might start with something like this: Bird Watching for Dummies: A Relaxing Hobby

Blog Post Success Tips

- Use a question as the title of the blog post
- Always include your keyword in the title
- Use your keyword two or three times within the blog post, once in the first paragraph, and once toward the end.
- Try to use your keyword early in paragraphs. Using your keyword phrase at the beginning is quite effective.
- Don’t use keyword stuffing. Too many repetitions will hurt your results rather than help.
- Use theme keywords to avoid overuse of one specific keyword or phrase.
- Utilize a question as your title. This is a good way to add variety to your titles.
- Start your title with a number, e.g. 7 Tips for …
- Engage your audience right away (first paragraph). Make them want to read more. Stories are a good way to accomplish this goal.
- State a problem that the reader has, and then set about giving a solution.
- Use lots of white space. That means no long paragraphs, and use bulleted lists as a way to help explain your solutions or provide your information.
- Be helpful. The reader should feel glad they read your post.
- Provide tips or resources that will be of immediate value to the reader.
- Link to another one of your blog posts (for added traffic potential). Make sure it’s relevant to the topic.
- Link to an external page, possibly your website, that will provide additional useful information.

Well, there are a few blog post strategy ideas that should help make your blog posts achieve higher prominence in the Google search results, and also ensure that you give your reader valuable information that will make them want to learn more from you.

Last week I crashed my car and spent 5 days in the hospital. I wasn’t injured although the crash was severe. I passed out while driving and I don’t actually remember anything of the crash. I spent many days in the hospital undergoing evaluation and numerous tests to try and figure out what happened that caused me to pass out.

I still don’t have an answer.

I got home a couple days ago, but had no time to get on my computer. Even now, I haven’t gotten into my regular mode of operation and just wanted to put out a quick post to anyone who reads my blog. I’m hoping this weekend I can start up putting out some good content.

Below is a list of article directories listed in order of their Alexa popularity, and with their Google PageRank also identified. If you plan to use articles to drive traffic, these sites are a good place to start.

Updated: March 28, 2009

URL AlexaRating GooglePagerank
1. ezinearticles.com 210 6
2. ArticlesBase.com 967 5
3. buzzle.com 2,100 6
4. searchwarp.com 7,115 4
5. pubs.acs.org/hotartcl 7,212 7
6. articlealley.com 15,925 5
7. goarticles.com 17,185 6
8. articlesnatch.com 23,336 2
9. articledashboard.com 23,883 6
10. webpronews.com 24,919 6
11. ideamarketers.com 26,267 3
12. amazines.com 28,739 3
13. articlegarden.com 31,391 4
14. upublish.info 31,668 4
15. isnare.com 32,606 4
16. 365articles.com 32,794 0
17. articlemaniac.com 33,954 4
18. articlecodex.com 35,514 3
19. articlesfactory.com 35,934 5
20. articleblotter.com 39,525 0
21. thecontentcorner.com 39,553 2
22. articlebliss.com 41,660 0
23. rightarticle.com 41,883 3
24. article-buzz.com 42,091 3
25. acmearticles.com 42,260 0
26. article99.com 42,388 4
27. articlepool.com 42,453 6
28. web-source.net 42,635 5
29. articlecell.com 45,076 1
30. ultimatearticledirectory.com 47,060 3
31. dime-co.com 49,121 4
32. articlerich.com 50,385 4
33. therealarticles.com 51,846 0
34. a1articles.com 52,546 4
35. free-articles-zone.com 52,812 4
36. affsphere.com 58,005 3
37. excellentguide.com/article/ 59,409 0
38. articleworld.net 60,814 3
39. internethomebusinessarticles.com 61,510 3
40. articlecube.com 65,141 5
41. articlecity.com 68,345 6
42. submityourarticle.com 71,200 2
43. articlewarehouse.com 71,480 3
44. site-reference.com 76,977 5
45. articlewheel.com 78,002 0
46. articles.everyquery.com 78,793 2
47. linksnoop.com 88,558 3
48. magportal.com 90,246 7
49. articleset.com 91,497 3
50. articletogo.com 96,782 2

Here’s the problem: what happens when someone requests a page on your site that does not exist? Well, they don’t arrive at the desired page and they are redirected to a 404 page (404 is an error code). Usually, the 404 page is generic as set up by the hosting service, but you can replace it.

I’m actually not going to talk about creating your own page today, but something very similar: redirecting to a page of your choice.

It turns out that by knowing a little behind the scenes code, you can make this happen quite easily.

A good resource for this type of information is www.htaccesstools.com, and that’s what I’m going to use today. Open up www.htaccesstools.com and on the right side under Htaccess Generators heading, select Error document.

That opens up a page where you can type in the desired redirect URL. Do so, fully qualified, now copy and paste the result and save the text as a .txt file, say 404error.txt for example.

Now, upload the file to the root of your domain, where you want to set up the 404 page redirection.

Before you do the next step, determine if you already have a file named .htaccess in your root directory. The root directory would be without any extra sub-directories, such as www.domain.com. If you already have an .htaccess file you can’t use the technique directly, although you could edit the .htaccess file.

Let’s assume you don’t have anything called .htaccess, and you have uploaded your new 404error.txt file. Rename the file as .htaccess with no other extension or prefix.

This .htaccess file tells where you want your 404 page error code to redirect when a requested page is not found.

Although it sounds a bit complicated, it’s really easy if you are the least bit familiar with uploading pages to your website hosting account.

While we didn’t actually create a new 404 page we did enable the request to be handled by redirecting the user to a valid URL of our choosing. This could be the root URL or any other URL you want.

Well, it wasn’t hard to find out. And now you will know too: visit TwitPic.com and it’s easy.

Most people don’t seem to know about this option, but my guess is that it will become quite popular.

At any rate, if you need or want to send Twitter pictures, use TwitPic and you’ll be all set.

As I write this post, I have joined Twitter only 24 hours ago. Already, after only about 30 minutes of effort, I have almost 120 followers, and I expect more to come on board over the next few days.

In the meantime, I will spend a little more time working with Twitter to get even more followers coming my way.

Twitter is a hot item right now, and a powerful way to drive traffic to your blog or website, and to begin establishing a relationship with people. Whether that relationship develops into a friendship or a business relationship, or a mentor-student relationship is irrelevant, as the point is that Twitter is enabling these relationships to get started.

As step one to the process of getting followers on Twitter, you need to spend a few moments getting your profile set up. There’s not much to it, just get a short bio statement and a link to your website. Also upload a picture of yourself so that people can identify with you.

When you get new followers (be patient), a natural activity is to send out a thank you response. That’s a fine idea but as you can imagine it gets time consuming if you are getting 100 new followers a day. There is a solution. You can sign up for a free Twitter-related service at TweetLater.com that will send out automated welcome messages for you. It’s a great time saver.

The messages are short, so you need to be creative with the available characters. Definitely thank them for following you. Without being pushy or trying to sell anything, you could offer your URL to get more help or learn about you. You can also offer a promise of future help, without any link.

The TweetLater service has other features as well, including one that will automatically follow anyone who follows you. That’s always nice and encourages them to stick around, so that’s what I’m doing.

How to Get Twitter Followers

Signing up for Twitter is easy, but then many people wonder what steps to take to get followers. I’ll give you the strategy I’m using. I’ve only tried it for one day, and that consisted of about 30 minutes of effort, and I got almost 120 followers, so it looks like it works to me.

Of course, I learned this strategy from an expert who has nearly 3,000 followers as we speak, and he’s not even trying hard to build his list further.

Here’s the key tip: in order to get followers, you must first follow other people. Many people will reciprocate with a follow. This is a pure, simple strategy that is super easy to implement.

But you don’t want to follow random people. What you do is search Twitter to find the “gurus” in your niche, or field, and follow the people that are following them. The gurus will have already attracted a targeted following, perfect you you to tap into and benefit.

You can also find guru’s promoting their Twitter link from their blogs and websites. That’s another way to find these valuable portals into the Twitter system.

Twitter allows you to follow a maximum of 2,000 people (unless you have a strong following yourself, in which case you are allowed more followers) so start sending out follow requests.

Find several gurus and make requests from their follow lists. Spread your requests around to get a more diverse group of followers.

To avoid the appearance of following many people with few followers yourself, you may want to space out your requests somewhat to allow people to follow you. Personally, I send out about 400 follow requests and got over 100 to follow within one day. I expect another 50-100 over the new week or so.

In the meantime, I’ll send out more requests.

As you attract followers, and they visit your profile, you will want to be sure that you have a link back to your blog or website. Twitter is a great source of traffic.

After sending out your follow requests, allow a week or two for people to follow. If they don’t you might want to unfollow them so you can make room for more requests. You should get a 25-50% follow ratio depending on whether your bio, picture, and any announcements you’ve prepared create a favorable impression.

So you will need to put together a few quality announcements to create the perception of value (and hopefully adding value is your primary objective).

After a few weeks, from your 2000 follow requests you sould be about to get 500 to 1000 followers!

It’s that fast and easy, and these are just the right targeted market you seek. That’s why Twitter is such a powerful resource.

All you need to do is get started and you could have a strong following in no time. Why not start today?

I was dead wrong about that.

Over the past month I’ve been exposed to Twitter almost everywhere. I was shopping in a convenience store and I saw a news broadcast that was covering Twitter. I bought some Thai food and while I was waiting for my order I browsed a news magazine ( I think Time) and found an article on Twitter. I opened the newspaper and found an article on Twitter.

As a marketer, Twitter offers a way to get in touch with like-minded people much more easily than ever before. Today, I tried Twitter for the first time and within 30 minutes I had 16 followers. By tomorrow I could easily have over 100 and then I’ll use my tactics to get more.

All of these people are at least somewhat interested in what I have to offer. And when I deliver value to them, they will become even more interested and want to visit my blog, or my website. And then I can have a more in-depth relationship than 140 characters at a time.

I found it quite fun to blast out a few messages and watch the followers build up. I will continue my practice of giving away valuable information in my Twitter announcements, so I suggest that you sign up to follow me. You can do that here: www.twitter.com/Phil_McCollum

Next, I will integrate this follow feature into my blog.

In order to optimize your screen capture video, you should record using a pre-determined size that matches the width versus height ratio at which your video will be displayed.

The standard ratios are 4 x 3, and 16 x 9. What this means as way of example is that a 4 x 3 ratio relates to a video capture of 320 x 240 pixels, or 640 x 480 pixels, etc.

When you record your video, you will want to use the proper aspect ratio to avoid distortion in the process of displaying your video.

And that brings me to the point of this post. There is a handy little utility software program that will automatically, at the click of a mouse, re-size your browser window to specific dimensions. That makes getting the right size a snap. And the utility has another use as well: it will tell you how big your browser window is. This is especially handy if you are sizing for non-standard dimensions.

The name of this utility software program is, not surprisingly, Sizer. It’s a free tool, and I recommend you grab it before they change their mind and start charging a fee. You can download the tool for yourself at www.brianapps.net/sizer.html

This tool is equally useful when you want to make screen capture images of a specific dimension. So whether you are tooling up for screen capture video or screen capture images, you can’t go wrong with Sizer in your toolkit.

It’s a fact that browsers can display the HTML code differently. What looks great on your favorite browser (where you preview the results) may not carry over to other browsers.

You could try and look at your site in many different browsers, but there is an easier way. Here is a utility program that allows you to preview how your site will appear on a wide range of browsers. It’s easy to use…just type in the URL of the page your want to preview.

You can try out the utility for yourself at browsershots.org

Now you can make sure your site looks good on many different browsers.

doPDF is a great PDF creater utility program

PDF files represent a common format that can be read by anyone. PDF stands for Portable Document Format and it was created by Adobe. To read the PDF format, you need a free Adobe Acrobat Reader software. You probably already have it on your computer, but if not you can download from Adobe.

Reading PDF files is one thing, but creating them is another story. If you’ve ever wanted to create PDF files, here is a simple and free method: doPDF

You can install doPDF for free and it’s a very handy utility. What it does is allows you to print documents as PDF files. Obviously, you don’t actually “print” the document, you create a PDF file instead.

Using doPDF will allow you to convert files to PDF just by printing them as you normally would, except you choose doPDF as the printer. Nothing could be easier.

It’s a blessing when you can find a simple tool like doPDF that does exactly what it claims with no fuss.

If you don’t think you need doPDF and don’t think you would ever want to create a PDF file, let me ask you this: have you ever ordered a product online?

What typically happens when you order online is that you are given a receipt page and told to print it. Well, what if you want to save that page to a file? Now you can with doPDF. There’s no need to print pages that will likely get lost when you can save the information to a file using doPDF.

Try doPDF and see for yourself. The setup is easy and usage is easy. It’s a great tool.

You can read more about doPDF and download a copy for yourself from www.dopdf.com

Go try it.

If you are unwilling to write down your goals, you most likely have no commitment to them. It takes discipline to clearly define goals, but it takes even more to commit.

Recently I established a goal to get at least 30 minutes of exercise every day during February. I made this goal after getting absolutely no exercise for the prior two weeks. I didn’t write down this goal because it was simple and very clear in my mind.

I did commit to the goal and having done so I immediately felt obligated to get my exercise. There were many days when I had to force myself, and that it the power of commitment to a goal.

I did well with my goal, but I was not a complete success. I made 15 straight days and then I missed one. But I did not quit on my goal at that point. I re-committed to see how many days I could meet my goal. The modification essentially gave me a new goal, and avoided the problem of quitting at the point of failure.

At the conclusion of February, I had gotten my 30 minutes of exercise on about 20 days. Another 6 days I got about 20 minutes, and there were a few days I got none.

I look back on this and I feel it was a success. I feel better because of the exercise. Now I need to set a new goal.

The first few days of March, I had no goal in place and I did nothing. Once again, this proved to me the power of goal setting.

I’ve been very busy the last few days, but I still could have gotten 20 or 30 minutes of exercise. I didn’t, because I lacked the extra motivation of an established goal.

In order to succeed in business or marketing, it is important to have goals. Without establishing a commitment, it is likely that you will do much less work than you wanted and you will fall short of your objective.

Much more can be accomplished when you focus your effort and commit.

This weekend was sunny and warm and my prime motivation was to get my exercise. I did, both Saturday and Sunday, and that left me feeling a bit worn down.

Even so, I did some marketing related activity to help me build my blog and that will become more evident as I get more and more material posted here.

I made some Blogger blogs, and kept hearing that I should try WordPress. Finally, I did. I have to admit that WordPress has a lot more to offer, in the form of themes and plugins.

It took me a little time to sort out the different WordPress options. I had some moments where it was almost driving me crazy that I couldn’t figure out what to do next, but I got past it.

Now, I’m fairly familiar with the dashboard and I know how to do most of the things I need to do: post with links and photos, update my categories, utilize the comment spam protection features, and even edit my theme.

Maintain a positive attitude

I’ve been a bit depressed for the past week as I made a mistake and bought some stock right before the market dropped 1,000 points. It made me feel stupid.
While I was out getting my 30 minutes of exercise today I decided to take a look at my current situation from a positive point of view and see how it looked.
Without getting into all the details, I was able to come up with about half a dozen things in my life that were going well and should make me feel good. Balanced against the loss of some money, the good clearly outweighed the bad.
I feel it’s all too easy to feel bad, either depressed, sad, or in a bad mood. We have control over how we feel, and it’s important to exert that control and take charge sometimes.
I hope someone will read this and take it to heart, and feel better as a result.

Internet Success Spider Software

I’m a firm believer in collecting valuable free software and reports when they are available. Even if I don’t have an immediate need for an item, it’s likely that over the course of a few months I will and then I can put it to good use.

I was recently informed about an offer to pick up the Internet Success Spider software from Neil Shearing for free. This software is designed to locate potential super affilate joint venture partners, which can greatly multiply your level of success.

Here’s the link to get your own copy of the software. I can’t guarantee how long this will stay live, so I apologize if the link has been disabled by the time you read this post.
http://www.grabthespider.com/index.php

The key is to know which features you need and find them at the best price. Most people start out thinking they only need one domain name, but let me offer some sage advice: you’ll probably want more than one and therefore you must select web hosting that permits unlimited domain names. You may find it hard to believe, but this capability is often offered and it hardly adds anything to the cost of your plan.

Another feature that is less obvious is to find web hosting that allows usage of many MySQL databases. Even if you have no idea what they are, many marketing tools available these days utilize the MySQL databases to store information. Once again, you might as well get unlimited (or large quantity) of allowable MySQL databases. My first web hosting account offered three, and it was not long before I found I couldn’t even use software I had purchased because I had already reached my limit. I’m going to tell you how to avoid this hassle in a moment.

The third feature I want to call your attention to is the control panel interface. The name of one popular system is cPanel and it comes with a lot of nice add-on features. I recommend getting a hosting account that uses the cPanel interface.

By this time, with unlimited domains and unlimited MySQL databases and cPanel, you’re probably getting a little concerned about the price. Well, relax. I have good news for you. You can get everything I mentioned for only $9.95 per month. You could even get it cheaper if you cut features, but for an extra couple of bucks a month you get some extras so I suggest you go for it.

The company I recommend, and the one I use, is called Host Gator. Take a look at what they have to offer today.

Host Gator Provides High Quality Affordable Web Hosting

What I’m referring to here are permission-based emails, which means that your prospect (recipient) has requested information and confirmed their request, a process that is referred to as a double opt-in.  The request and confirmation process is necessary to avoid spam complaints.  Many people have abused email so safeguards are now essential.

The key characteristic of a quality autoresponder system or service is deliverability.  You want to be sure your emails don’t get blocked due to past complaints regarding the autoresponder company. By the way, you can buy autoresponder software but you must then send out the emails from your own account.  Send to many and get complaints and your internet service provider may shut down your account.  For this reason, many people choose to use a subscription service.

The best autoresponder services provide reliable delivery of messages and allow an unlimited number of autoresponder lists (of messages).  Multiple lists are often desired to target different market segments, or different markets altogether.  You will also want to be able to select the intervals for your message delivery and to send “broadcast” messages whenever you want. The interval delivery consists of defining how many days to wait between each message.  The first message goes out right away and subsequent messages can be sent a selected number of days after the previous message. Another key feature is the ability to create customized webforms.  These are the forms used to have people subscribe to your list.  They can be designed to include headlines, graphics, and so on. And you will want a knowledge base plus customer support to get answers to your questions.

There are several good autoresponder choices available.  The service I have selected for my own use is Aweber.  They offer a full-featured autoresponder service and provide extensive training to help subscribers get the most out of the system.  You can check out Aweber and even take the system for a test drive.

Other autoresponder services you may want to consider include GetResponse and ConstantContact.

I followed my usual course, riding along the river-trail bike path to the beach, and then along the beach for about 5 miles.  All told, I put in about 25 miles and got a good workout.  I started this day somewhat dehydrated, which is never a good thing.  You’ve probably heard you should drink 8 glasses of water a day (64 ounces) and it’s true, but most people don’t come close.

I felt a bit weak this morning and should have gulped down a couple glasses to help restore hydration.  Well, as a result of NOT taking care of that, I got even more dehydrated from the ride and I was really feeling it.
I’ve done this ride a few times already this month and this was most tired I’ve felt.  My immediate plan, now that I’ve made it back home, is to drink, eat, and relax.

As a status report, my fitness challenge is going quite well.  I’ve had days when I did not make my 30 minutes activity level, but only one day in three weeks that I did nothing.  I’m telling you, it really, really makes a difference when you commit to something.  I was just reading about “The Biggest Loser” and that’s the same thing. Some of those people have made a major turnaround in their life by focusing their energy on getting healthy.  And of course it helps to have a coach or someone to push you in the right direction and keep you on track.

Let me sum up by saying I plan on establishing a new plan once March arrives because I don’t want to go back to the freedom to do nothing.

firefox browser and the scrapbook plugin

It’s probably obvious from the title of this post that I’m a Mozilla Firefox user.  Actually, I use both Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 because I have a few custom applications that don’t run 100% right on Firefox.  I think it’s ridiculous that software developers let this happen.  I think over 40% of people now use Firefox (I don’t have the data to confirm that statement available right now).  When I do use Internet Explorer, it seems my anti-virus software is always catching some sort of attack on my system.  When I run Firefox, that just does not happen.  It’s a much safer surfing environment.

One of the nice features about Firefox is that you can customize it with plug-ins.  I’ve found a few I like and I want to let you know about one in particular today.  It’s called Scrapbook.  With the Scrapbook plug-in, you can save web pages on your computer.  This is NOT the same a bookmarking.  The software actually saves the page and you can view it when you are offline.  It saves links within the pages as well, but of course you need to be connected to the internet for the links to work.

It wasn’t long ago that I was flying home from Virginia and I saved a bunch of pages before I departed for the airport.  Then later, when I was on the plane, I was able to pull up the pages using Scrapbook and read them.  That was cool.

The way I use Scrapbook is to save pages that I want to look at later but may not want to keep permanently.  I also save pages that are valuable to me and I want to preserve them in case the site goes down or the page is removed.

You can do much more with this software that I haven’t even played around with.  I know you can delete any part of the saved page you don’t want and I’m pretty sure you can highlight and change formatting of the page.

I highly recommend downloading this plug-in for Firefox, and by all means give Firefox a try if you are still stuck with Internet Explorer.

If anybody knows about other awesome Firefox plug-ins, I hope you’ll leave a comment.  Thanks.