SUMMARY

written by Tina Wang

When I do make time to spend on my blog much of it makes me realize just how much I need to learn in running a blog.

Having discussions with people and developing connections and friendships online is definitely a great value. I love this part of blogging and knowing there are friends who support me and who have similar thoughts and experiences that visit my blog on a regular basis. This is a huge encouragement which makes the time spent feel so much more valuable.

Written content is continually valuable for yourself and others as reference material. I find myself referring to articles and series I wrote quite a while ago now very often and they are always valuable to me to pass along to people asking about those subjects. I’m constantly surprised by how much volume of content that accumulates from blogging and how useful it can be in a variety of situations.

The other great thing to be learned from the content is in writing it itself. I write about subjects I am interested in but I certainly don’t only pick subjects I already know about. I go out and research my topics, I read books and articles to gain some insight and varying perspectives on the subject and then I write my own version and opinions on the subject based on what I’ve learned and experienced about it. Sometimes this is over the course of years or even my whole lifetime and sometimes it’s over the course of a few hours. There is something I learn, reinforce or realize every time I write any new content.

HOW TO PROMOTE YOUR APP IN APP STORE

written by Tina Wang

Now, iPhone app development is becoming as very lucrative business and many tech pundits and companies are getting into developing dedicated iOS app. It doesn’t matter what niche you are in, but if you get a kick-ass iOS app developer for your business, it could be one of the best business decision which you might have made ever. Now the hard part after creating an iOS app, is promoting it. Developers who are mostly glued with codes and only app development, they find it hard to promote iOS apps to a large audience, and this is one big road-block on reaching out to masses.

So for the large number of developers who are eyeing to strike big on the popular app market, here are some important points to help you promote and market your iOS app/game in the Apple app Store

Here are few steps which will help you to make your iOS app to masses:

1.Submit For Reviews
Getting your app/game reviewed is a must for developers willing to promote their app to success. Major app review sites like MobileStartupz.com, 148apps, AppVee, AppStoreApps.com,  TUAW and Apps Safari  are some of the good options to be considered. Submitting to review sites will provide your app with the initial publicity and if your app is really good, then it will also help you in get noticed in the app industry.
If you have developed a paid app, make sure you add the redemption code so that Bloggers can download your Paid app for free and write a review.

2.Social networking
Post about your apps and announce to your friends, family and associates  across some of your popular social networks accounts like Facebook, WeChat, Google Plus, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. Submit your iPhone/iPad app to social media and bookmarking sites like digg , stumble upon, reddit etc. 

3.Create a new website/Landing page
Create a new website with relevant domain name and SEO optimized keywords to promote and market your app. Include some video description about the app and screenshots to make the consumer become aware of its features and usefulness. Collect relevant customer feedback and provide forums for user queries.

4.Promote through Free Content
Promote your app through blogs related to mobile apps or technology or startup communities. Such as MobileStartupz.Com(free), a startup voting community that ranks apps submitted every month end. The Website is also a good option if you have multiple apps for different operating systems because they do even accept Android, Windows Phone and Blackberry apps.

5.Advertise your App
Advertising is a great idea for any kind of app/game, old or new. Get to know the sites where the website fits to your app category and buy some ad space to promote iOS app .You can even contact few bloggers who are willing to put up ads for your app or even for review it. Popularizing iPhone/iPad app through advertising promotions is a great way to reach large number of people and get a good user base.

6.Create Free Trail and Paid Versions
You can get a large user base by promoting your free app (either trial or with ads). If the user requires more functionality or features of the full app, provide an option to buy it within the app using the in-app purchases. Hence you could be making a good profit on the ads driven free app and the fully paid premium app.

7.Search marketing
Search marketing like Google AdWords , Yahoo Search Marketing,Bing Search Marketing, Baidu Advertising(China), Yandex Search Advertising(Russia) offers suitable keyword advertising related to your app. Select the appropriate keywords and budget and link the ad to the itunes app store directly.

8.Collaborate
Collaborating with the influencers in your industry and businessmen who are well-known in your technology, will help you get recognition in your field and to your app identity.Find people who are like-minded and good in your area and collaborate in promoting the iOS app and give something in return. Few examples include tech bloggers, book authors, newspaper journalists etc. You can even consider collaborating with your minor competitors in growing together in a partnership against major ones. So these are the few tips to developers of iPhone/iPad applications to promote their app efficiently in a small period of time.

If you would like to share any tricks or ideas of promoting your iOS app, you can comment on this page.

7 SEO TIPS TO HELP YOUR BLOGS

written by Tina Wang

You've been working hard on your blog, you feel established. Now it's time to get serious about traffic. Here are 7 easy ways you can use SEO to increase blog traffic.

Useful Tips and Tricks

When we talk about SEO, very first thing which you need to keep in mind is: We can control on site and off site SEO. On Page SEO is covered by you which includes article quality, how well it’s optimized for Keyword and meta value for that article. there’s no need to feel furious or lost with above SEO terminology.

1.     Format Blogger post URL link

While writing a blog post, you have an option to edit the permalink. Simply use it to edit your permalink and remove the stop words. A good idea is just to use Keywords in your permalink.

Simply select manual permalink and edit it according to your wish. Check this screenshot for example:

2.     Maintain the keyword density

Keyword density is an important aspect for better ranking. Too less will lead to less ranking and stuffing your Keyword will lead to over optimization. Though, you can pick keyword density for your Blogpost SEO, account to one which works for you. Publish articles in relevance to post title and include necessary keywords in the post. Never stuff keywords to manipulate search engines. But after finish you can analyze the whole post to find out suitable locations where the keywords can be safely inserted without distracting readers.

3.     BlogSpot proper labels and related posts

Label adds to the keyword density of the post. Labels should be widened rather than putting them into the single narrow category. I will explain this point by an example. Consider a situation when you are posting about Google chrome and putting them into label Windows software’s or browser. Here you will miss keywords like Chrome browser, Google chrome, etc. which would otherwise add to the keyword density of the whole post. Labels also affect related posts widgets in Blogger. And if there are so many posts tagged with similar labels, it would affect the arrangement of articles in related posts.

4.     Format Blogspot images for SEO

 In WordPress, this could be easily achieved by using plugins but in BlogSpot this needs be done manually. You should insert them manually after uploading each image. For more details, you can read in:http://www.shoutmeloud.com/image-optimization-for-seo.html

5.    Provide meta tags

Meta tags are generated HTML tags used by search engines to identify the title, description, and other details of a URL. They don’t have much influence on search as they were before, but would make a slight impact on targeted keywords.

Provide good title, description, and footer text

Title, footer, and description plays an important role in search engine optimization of every blog. If you are targeting, some keywords make sure that you included those keywords in the above-mentioned locations.

6.     Nofollow external links

Nofollow is an HTML attribute specified on hyperlinks to block search engine advantage of external links in a website. In Blogger, you can select HTML section of the post window and add rel=”nofollow” attribute just after URL to prevent search engines from crawling a particular link. 

7.    Format comment section

The Comment section should be no-followed and moderated to avoid spam comments. Try to include the post keywords when you are replying to reader comments. This would also add up to the total keyword density of the post. Since Google have integrated Google plus comment form with BlogSpot, I highly recommend you to enable it. This will ensure that you get higher social media interaction and share for your post.

Hope this guide will give you much better idea about BlogSpot SEO and can help you to increase your traffic.

WHY YOU NEED BUSINESS BLOGS

written by Tina Wang

According to the Technorati report, blogs are now the third most influential digital resource for consumers making a purchase. Consumers said that blogs ranks higher than Facebook for motivating a purchase decision.

What does this mean? 

Blogs are a valuable marketing tool. 

So, maybe you have no idea why businesses should blog before, but you will know why you should use blogging as a marketing tactic in this page.

First, think about how people find your business website:

l  Search directly. This means this customer is old one and cannot help you get more traffic.

l  Pay for traffic by placing paid search ads, quite expensive. And the second you run out of money, your traffic stops coming, too.

So, the way you can drive traffic is blogging, social media, and search engines. When you consider your business website pages and how often you update those webpages, you maybe already know why you need blogging.

1.      Every time you write a blog post, it's one more indexed page on your website. It's also one more cue to Google and other search engines that your website is active and they should be checking in frequently to see what content you've published that they should surface.

2.      Every new indexed page is one more opportunity for you to show up in search engines, and drive traffic to your website through organic search. We'll get into more of the benefits of blogging on your SEO a bit later.

3.      Blogging also helps you get discovered via social media. Every time you write a blog post, you're creating content that people can share on social networks: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, WeChat, and Google+, which helps expose your business to a new audience that doesn't know you yet.

Here is the first reason why you need blog. It helps drive new traffic to your website and works closely with search engines and social media to do that. What’s more, you have already have the chance to convert that traffic into leads. Just like every blog post you write is another indexed page, each post is a new opportunity to generate new leads. And the way this works is really simple: Just add a lead-generating call-to-action to every blog post.

As we can see from the figure, the best business blogs answer common questions their leads and customers have. If you're consistently creating content that's helpful for your target customer, it'll help establish you as an authority in their eyes. This is a particularly handy tool for Sales and Service professionals. "Establishing authority" is a fluffy metric -- certainly not as concrete as traffic and leads, but it's pretty powerful stuff.

Furthermore: remember what blogs does: largely through search engines!

There are other reasons businesses might want to blog but I think these are some core benefits. Are you already well underway when it comes to business blogging now? By the way, I will talk about how SEO helps blogs in my blogger later and any comments and discussion is welcomed!