By : Nidhi Gupta

Whether your launching your brand new web site, or trying to increase current business from the web, you should be using both pay per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) in your internet marketing plan.

Why both? Quite simply they can compliment each other. Pay Per Click is a fast, very controlable form of internet marketing. Search Engine Optimization is a viable, must needed method to promote your site ‘organically’ in Google, Yahoo, MSN and so-on.

Search engine optimization takes time. If you are a brand new site, consider a good 6 months to a year (yes that long) to really start seeing some good ranking results on the search engines. While you build up your organic SEO, you can have Pay Per Click in place helping you bring in leads by promoting sales, offers, specific products and services. Pay Per Click can literally turn on within a day, use a very specific budget (monthly, daily, etc), track results to and from your web site and even be geographically or industry targeted.

As your organic side of internet marketing grows, consider slowing down the pay per click side. For example, if you have a great keyword ranking in the top 10 positions of Google (the left hand side of their search engine), then you may want to scale back on the paid version of this keyword to save money. The beauty of this is simple testing, re-testing and reviewing your campaigns to see what works, what’s already ranking and what can be removed to save you on marketing costs.

Spread the word: related/bookmark it/readit

By : Nidhi Gupta

Attracting new writers to your blog is a difficult process and there are many variables to consider. Your goal is to sustain the value your blog offers, or ideally, increase the value it offers to your readers. As most bloggers know, value comes from content, and content comes from the minds of people, so your first goal when outsourcing the writing of your blog is to find the right people.

It’s pretty clear that the best blogs have talented people writing them. While talent alone isn’t enough, it’s important to focus on attracting, then filtering and finally retaining talented individuals as the key outcome of your outsourcing efforts. Even if a blogger can’t commit to as many articles as you would like them to write, having one great blogger send in one article a month will do more for your traffic and blog growth than a mediocre blogger writing once a week.

Finding talent is not a process that can be done quickly and you won’t really know if a new writer you bring to your blog works well until they have published to your blog for a period of time. Watching how the blogosphere reacts to your hired bloggers is a good way to determine if you have added a good person to your team. Look for comments, trackbacks and incoming links generated by your bloggers as key metrics to assess their performance.

When Is The Right Time To Hire Bloggers?

This is a tough question to answer. You have two variables to consider -

1. You
   How much writing do you intend to do yourself and what role do you want to play at your blog(s).

2. The current status of your blog
   How much traffic you have, how entrenched is your personality with the current readership, what can your blog and you offer to incentivise contributions.

The first part, only you have to decide, since you know what volume of work you want to contribute to your blog and what role you want to play. You may have an end goal of stopping writing altogether and acting as the manager of a team of writers. Or you may want to continue writing to your blog but want to bring on additional bloggers to increase traffic, or start a new blog or even a blog network.

Read the rest of this entry »