Brent's Social CRM Blog

Chris Garrett and Wordtracker Team Up to Help Your Business Blogging Efforts

Chris Garrett is a professional blogger who wrote the book on the subject - literally. Along with Darren Rowse, Chris co-authored the extremely influential Problogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income.

Ken McGaffin is the chief marketing officer of Wordtracker - the makers of some of the leading keyword research tools on the market for search engine optimization.

Recently Chris and Wordtracker put together an information packed ebook - Blogging for Business: 50 Steps to Building Traffic and Sales. I had Chris and Ken on to talk about some of the key points covered in the 160+ page book. They touch on strategies, tools, tactics and techniques for getting off the ground if you're a newbie, or upping your game if you're trying to take your blogging to the next level.

It was impossible to get to everything covered in the book, but we did talk about how Chris uses Google Analytics to track blog traffic, and Feedburner for tracking engagement and conversions. He shares a few tricks he uses to get convert site visitors to subscribers. And Chris also explains why he tracks complaints - and shares why he actually encourages people to complain. And Ken shares how he finds great ideas for getting past writer's block, and a great story of how you can use keyword research to help improve social media monitoring efforts. I hadn't thought of this before but these kinds of research tools are not just good for finding words to feature in your content, but they're also great for finding words you should be monitoring on Twitter to enable you to join realtime conversations important to your business. Also check out Chris talking about the case study he did on using Twitter to launch a new website.

Check out the conversation below, or download the mp3 by clicking here. I got a great deal out of talking to them, and found the ebook to be a wealth of valuable information. And if you're interested in the ebook, you can use this link to get it for $29 - $10 off of the $39 regular price. Big thanks to the folks at Wordtracker for giving my blog readers this special discount.

Technorati : business blogging, chris garrett, wordtracker
Del.icio.us : business blogging, chris garrett, wordtracker

Tales in Social CRM: Rapping SEO???

Who saw this coming? My latest column for Inc.com's technology site was on The Three A's of Social CRM - Automation, Analysis and Audacity. The following video is an example of the latter. Meet Chuck (not that Chuck), aka The SEO Rapper. Yup, you read correctly... SEO Rapper. And dude does look like Biggie, and a touch like Sir Mix-a-Little....but I digress...

Do I even have to explain why this is audatious? All you need to know is this video has been viewed over 300K times since March, has well over 500 comments and a 4.5 rating on over 1400 votes. Combining rapping with SEO isn't the traditional way of marketing your skills, but we're not in traditional times. Competition for hearts and minds, and attention, is fierce. So find new ways of engaging those you wish to, well, engage... In the immortal words (or sounds) of Grover Washington Jr., it's time to let it flow....

Technorati : biggie, rap, seo, social crm, youtube
Del.icio.us : biggie, rap, seo, social crm, youtube

Domains, Trains and Automobiles....

I've been on an seo/keyword research kick lately. Exhibit one of this would be my rant on how I trust Wordtracker's keyword research tool better than Google's free tool because of the list of related keywords returned when I plugged in my name. Now I present exhibits two and three with links to a few recent articles I wrote for different sites:

• Small Business Trends - Master of My Domain Names
• Wordtracker.com - Building a Radio Show Audience One Keyword At A Time

That's it. Sorry, no trains or automobiles in this one. I just thought it was a nice play on words for the title.

Technorati : domain names, keyword research, small business, wordtracker

Why I Trust My Good Name to Wordtracker and Not Google

Recently I've been doing a great deal of keyword research, much more than I usually do. Partly because I went on a bit of a domain name shopping spree, and also in preparation for writing a few articles as well as a case study. So I really went into Wordtracker hard trying out different terms to find related keywords that I wouldn't normally come up with on my own.

For example here are a few related words that Wordtracker spit out for the term chocolate:

These are just of a few of the words and phrases that Wordtracker came up with that somehow relate to the word chocolate. My favorite is "Oprah favorite things" there at #29. As I pointed out in one of the articles I wrote, I didn't make that up trying to be funny, blame that one on Wordtracker. Just out of curiosity I also checked out Google's free keyword selector tool to see what words they came up with for chocolate and they came up with many of the same words. Surprisingly enough, Oprah was no where to be found this time around.

After playing with a few other terms I got a little curious to see what Wordtracker and Google would spit out for my name. Here's where things got interesting. Here are some of the phrases Wordtracker came up with for brent leary:

Now most of these make a lot of sense to me as I'm pretty heavily involved in crm, technology, web 2.0 and small business. And since I host a radio show it makes sense for that to be there. There were a few things missing in the top 20, like devilishly handsome, genius, and one of a kind, but I think they were just further down on the list.

Now compare this list with the list from Google's keyword selector tool:

Um.....yeah.....this reads more like my Christmas card list to send out to family members, except most of these names aren't in my family and I don't send out Christmas cards. In fact I think Google gave my relative keywords instead of related ones, as the only thing that links me to these results is my last name. Nothing else.

So I was really kind of freaked out by this, so I decided to run one more test and see what Google would spit out for crm:

Well if it wasn't for the last entry, call center jobs, I would have said it looks like they just found words with the term crm in it. But still I needed to see what Wordtracker came back with:

Once again Wordtracker came back with a much more varied list of related phrases. So I'd have to say I definitely feel more comfortable with the Wordtracker results, even if I do have to put out a few bucks compared to Google's freebie. If you're heavy into keyword research you may want to consider it to.

Technorati : google, keyword research, wordtracker