You can’t get good search engine rankings with blogs? and “It’s difficult to publish audio and video on blogs!”

it is easy to add audio and video to your blog

Feature: Episode #8 finishes up our 7 part series titled ’7 Misconceptions of Blogging’, and reveals Misconception #7: "You can’t get good search engine rankings with a blog?!" Plus I add one more bonus misconception "I hear it’s difficult to publish audio and video on blogs!"

I expose these 2 misconception and reveal how my blogging strategy boosted a network of 23 dental locations to the top 10 for the region’s desired search phrases, delivering more than $3 million dollars in Lifetime Value to the client in as short as 4 to 6 weeks.

Download and enjoy this podcast episode.

Transcript

[Music]

Announcer: ShermanLive.com. Simplifying and demystifying technology so you can profit from it. Welcome to ShermanLive.com. Presenting time-saving tips, shortcuts, how-tos, leading-edge techniques and money-generating strategies. Here’s Sherman Hu.

Sherman Hu: Hello, and welcome to Episode Number eight of ShermanLive.com. This is your host, Sherman Hu, and I am refreshed and recharged to record this podcast for you, because Sarah and I just returned from a wonderful weekend vacation to our favorite local resort – Harrison Hot Springs. To find out more you can go to HarrisonResort.com.

We were of course greeted by wonderful service, once again, by Crystal who served us in the Lakeside Caf and also in the Copper Room where you have fine dining, dinner and dancing with Jerry J and his gang. Thank you for the wonderful music for those two nights in the Copper Room. And here’s a shout-out to all of the folks who work at Harrison Resort. They make it like "Cheers", where we walk in and everybody knows are name. We have a wonderful time there!

Anyway, back to our regular programming. Today we have an episode, revealing Blogging Misconception Number 7, which I’m excited about because it’s the last of the series. The series is titled "Seven Misconceptions About Blogging", in case you haven’t joined us for our previous episodes.

Today’s episode is Episode Number 7, and it’s titled, "You Can’t Get Good Search Engine Rankings with a Blog!". Plus, I’ll also be adding a bonus episode to this one. It’s a bonus misconception titled, "I Hear it’s Difficult to Publish Audio and Video on Blogs".

Well you are in for a treat today. Stay tuned for thi episode as I reveal eye-opening strategies and techniques.

[Music]
Announcer: You’re listening to ShermanLive.com. Keeping it simple, stupid. Did I say that? Stay tuned for more juicy stuffy from Sherman Hu…

Sherman: So you’re at a party, and you’re talking to your friend, your buddy, about blogging, and he goes, "You can’t get good search engine rankings with a blog!" Now this should your answer: Of course you can!

Now speaking from my experience as a search engine marketing professional servicing clients in competitive sectors like travel, real estate and dentistry, I’ve worked on and experienced first hand the results a blog can achieve for search engine rankings.

Now I have clients to this day who are ranked in the top ten positions in the major search engines, for their important search phrases, using WordPress as a blogging platform. Some of them have been in the top ten since 2002. So I want to let you know that it can happen for you if you’re working on a blog strategy for your business online.

Now real quickly, let me share with you a case study that will blow your mind. A good friend of mine, David Bullock, whom can be found at DavidBullock.com: he’s a pro when it comes to testing, tracking and conversions. And him and I, we’re working on this project with his client who was a dentist, who has a network of 23 different locations.

So what we did was we took the 23 locations and we consulted with the client, and he wanted the locations to show up in top 10 in search engines for the important phrases. We’re not just talking about "cosmetic dentistry", but we want to get it ranked well for "cosmetic dentistry, Portland Oregon", for example. So long-tailed search phrases.

We deployed a strategy where each location would have its own blog. Each location would have pre-written content, pre-scheduled to release into the blog once a day I believe, or once a week; I can’t remember now. But that was the strategy, and we maybe deployed some article marketing strategies on top of that.

What happened was, in a period of four to six weeks every one of those blogs showed up in the top ten for the clients desired phrases for that region.

So here are the results: Each location had ten new clients that visited that dental location. Now each client would deliver to that location an additional $15,000 in lifetime value. Now multiply that by ten clients, that’s $150,000 lifetime value for one location.

You multiply that by 23 locations, and that is more than $3 million in lifetime value that we delivered to this client using blogging as a major strategy, and that was in a period of four to six weeks! So yes, it can get you incredible results!

Now of course I’ve blogged to support my own products and services as well, with great results. Now granted that you should augment your blogging with other search marketing strategies and best practices, but blogging attracts the search engines to your website today, like bees to honey!

Now here’s one reason why I believe it is so powerful: The search engines – let’s use Google as an example – they want to please their customers. People who surf using Google; now those are their customers. And they want to serve them strong, relevant results. Otherwise, the customers will attempt to use the competitor – Yahoo, MSN – to get what they want.

Now what do bloggers often do? They often publish fresh, topical content to the blogs regularly. Now Google loves fresh new content, and bloggers offer fresh new content. It’s a beautiful thing, isn’t it? So the search engines are constantly crawling blogs, quickly and regularly.

Would you like to know one of the other reasons why blogs attract search engines? It’s because they update or notify the search engines of new content being published to the blog. How is this done? In WordPress there’s a feature called "Update Services", which pings or updates a host of blog directories when new content is published to the blog, automatically, without the publisher making any effort to draw the search engines in. And that’s very good news.

So now that you know that you can get good to great search engine rankings with blogs, let’s get blogging!

[Music]
Announcer: You’re tuned in to ShermanLive.com. Keeping it simple for you…

Sherman: All right! So here we go with a bonus misconception that states, "I hear it’s difficult to publish audio and video on blogs." [vocalizes buzzer noise] Wrong again! Who did you hear that from?

Well, publishing audio and video, also called "podcasts", is super easy on blogs like WordPress. With the appropriate plug-ins, like the ones I’m going to list for you in a moment, you can simply and easily add audio and video to your blogs today.

If you Google for these four plug-ins, it will start you off real well. Now these plug-ins are for the WordPress blogging platform only, but there are others for other blogging platforms like Moveable Type, if that’s what you’re using.

Now, the plug-ins and the support of these plug-ins are offered by the developers of these plug-ins, OK?

So, number one, Google for a video plug-in called "WP-FLV". OK, WP is short for WordPress, and FLV is Flash Video. So WP-FLV is by a developer by the name of Roel Meurders.

Now, there’s another audio player plug-in called the "Audio Player WordPress Plugin". It is by a company called one 1 Pixel Out.

Now, there’s another media plug-in out there by AnArchos, and the plug-in’s called "Anarchy Media Plugin". And that one, I believe, allows you to publish both audio and video, so that’s pretty cool.

And if you want to publish your audio and allow that to be easily fed in through to iTunes so that your podcast can be on iTunes, then you might want to look at a company called Mighty Seek, and they have a plug-in called "PodPress". And the podcast on shermanlive.com is powered by this plug-in called PodPress.

All right, now, these plug-ins, you can read how to install them from the developers’ sites, and that will allow you to go ahead and easily publish audio and video to your blog so that your customers can hear it. Now, and of course, if you’d like to save time, money, and your sanity, and want to learn how to add audio and video to your blog easily, then of course, subscribe to WordPressTutorials.com and we’ll help you with that through training videos.

Now, as a side note here, you may want to also look at a service provided by AudioAcrobat.com. They allow you to not only upload your video and audio, but they also allow you to record your video and audio straight to their service. It’s a web-based service, and you pay a small subscription fee every month. But it tracks your statistics, so it can tell you how many people have clicked on your play button, how many people have actually listened to your audio piece or your video piece, and how much they’ve listened to it.

So you can tell that if, let’s say 90 percent of the people are really tuning out and dropping off your audio-video piece halfway through your media segment, then you know that you’ve got to spice it up somewhere in there, halfway through it, so that you’re not putting your people to sleep. So that’s great. It offers statistics. Not only that, they offer you players that you can take the HTML, the code, and plug into your blog, and it will insert that player in there for you. So that’s a real great service to check out.

The one that I use for hosting my audio, my podcast, is at Libsyn.org. Lybsyn has an interesting model. It’s a paid model, so you pay a subscription fee, or a monthly fee, for that. However, they don’t charge you for bandwidth usage. So they don’t charge you by how much you use it over the month, but they charge you by how much space and storage you’re using by hosting your files there, which is actually a great model.

So, no matter if you have a popular or unpopular podcast, you’re not really paying more or less for that. You’re just paying for the size of your files that you host with them. And so, you definitely want to check them out, too.

All right, so now that you’ve heard about how to publish audio and video on your blogs, and you know that it’s easy and a myth of how difficult it is to publish has been broken, let’s get blogging!

[Music]
Announcer: You’re tuned in to ShermanLive.com. Making it simple for you..

Sherman: Well, thanks for staying tuned to this episode of ShermanLive.com. I’ve had a blast producing this for you. Next episode we’ll cover… [laughs] Well, I really don’t know what we’ll cover next episode. I do know it probably will have something to do with Facebook, because I’m having a blast right now engaging with old friends and contacts and, of course, with marketing colleagues and new acquaintances through these friends of mine.

And I’ve set up two groups now. I’ve set up Friends and Fans of Sherman Hu’s WordPressTutorials.com, which is a closed group to, of course, members of WordPressTutorials.com. And I’ve set up another open group. So if you’re listening to this podcast and you want to join this open group, you can.

It’s actually called "The Beginner’s Guide to Mastering Web Basics". And we cover basic topics, stuff that the technophobes on this call would be totally comfortable checking out and learning from, and beginners, too. Really, we cover topics like domain registration, hosting, FTP–which is an acronym for file transfer protocol, which is really the process in which you transfer files from your desktop, your computer, to your hosting account, or vice versa.

And we cover things like sourcing for stock photography and graphics, and how to edit that. All the basic stuff about mastering your way around the web.

Now, if you are pretty savvy yourself, you may have come across friends and family who are bugging you all the time about how to do this and how to do that.

And I’ve experienced that a lot, so this is my way of not experiencing the cruel and unusual punishment of having to repeat myself over and over again every time. So I’ve created these video tutorials, set it up on Facebook so that friends and family can enjoy, and I welcome you and encourage you to send your friends and family there.

Right now, as of this podcast, there are probably about 215 members there right now, which is great, having a fun time and meeting new people and sharing. And I’d love for the group to expand, not only its members, but also having members share their experiences and thoughts for beginners and technophobes to enjoy and to learn from.

So, look forward to seeing you on Facebook. And stay tuned for the next episode, and we’ll discover together how to use Facebook to expand your network–but not only that, to expand the results of your marketing.

Announcer: You’ve been tuned in to Sherman, on ShermanLive.com. Want to call Sherman or send him some love? Go to ShermanLive.com today.