Yesterday Search Engine Journal launched a new blogging project called Daily SEO Tip, a blog which will feature one SEO tip, video or tutorial per day. The project was inspired by my friend Daniel Scocco at Daily Blog Tips, and is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.
Basically, to summarize my first post at Daily SEO Tip, I launched Search Engine Journal over 5 years ago, blogging from the heart with no boundaries or really no set plan. Little did I know at the time that SEJ would change my life, have an average of 10,000 visitors daily and about 20,000 RSS subscribers. I’ve wanted to get fresh again with blogging, and try some blogging ideas in terms of transparency & community, so thought what better way to do this than launching a brand new blog (with the help of Ann Smarty).
So, for Daily SEO Tip, Ann & I decided to go organic, simple and transparent, incorporating the following widgets and plugins :
- A very simple Freshpress template which has a very nice feel and kind of has a Twitter style to it.
- No advertisements. We decided not to use any ads for the time being to improve linkability and usability. This also concentrates the reader on the call to action, which is the discussion itself.
- No NoFollow. I’m against the idea of blocking the links of readers who contribute discussion. I always have been, but at SEJ we use nofollow because of the insane amount of blogspam a 5 year old blog with almost 10,000 posts can attract. Our goal is to have full organic comment linking at Daily SEO Tip.
- TweetBacks : If you share our posts on Twitter, we link back ot your Twitter post in the comments. Meaning that readers build more links and recognition to their Twitter profiles.
- CommentLuv (as well as CommentLuv premium) is a plugin which shows a link to the commenter’s last blog post after their comment. Again, it’s not only the chance to build a deep link for the commenter, but also for other readers to be introduced to new blogs.
- Contribute : At Daily SEO Tip we encourage readers to contribute their own tips, and will publish reader tips every Friday!
- Blogroll : We plan on building the one of the biggest blogrolls in search blogging, and encourage readers to suggest their site via commenting
- Interactivity : Polls and threaded commenting will lend a form of social interaction to the site, leading to more interaction and discussion.
By incorporating outbound organic links, interaction between readers and a simple and fresh design, Daily SEO Tip has already become a hit, with it’s first introductory post resulting in over 50 comments!
Moreover, by inviting the community to contribute to the site and its comments, we already have built a considerable amount of buzz on Twitter and are close to triple digit RSS subscribers (after only one post!).
Inbound links from Twitter may not initially help, but after being alive after only 12 hours, we now have a handful of inbound organic links and expect this to grow.
By giving back to readers, especially SEO’s, being transparent and organic, Daily SEO TIp is bound to attract some interest in the SEO community and most importantly, help out new or established SEO’s by keeping them fresh with one tutorial per day.
We even have a mission statement which was contributed by one of our readers : To deliver Bitesized daily tips to help keep your SEO knowledge fresh without cluttering up your feed-reader.
In almost any relationship, you have to give some to get some. When attracting links and traffic, by being generous in your outbound linking and contributions to others, you’re going to attract the interest, loyalty and attention needed to get people involved and linking to you. If readers (or customers) feel that they are part of an overall project, they will naturally link, Stumble, Digg and retweet you, without having to be asked.
When readers/customers/followers are taking it upon themselves to spread your thoughts, links and introduce others to your site via their Facebook profiles and Twitter feeds they are no longer just visitors to your site; they are brand evangelists and your marketing team 🙂
