No, I am not recommending that you throw your biggest competitor in your blogroll. But you should keep up to date on what they are doing. This makes sense as a business rule in general, I mean if your competitor beats you to the punch on a big technology break through, you could go out of business. If they ramp up their online marketing and you fail to keep up with them they will gain a huge share of the internet consumers, and that could hurt big time in two or three years.

There are plenty of ways to see what your competition is up to, but quite simply, going to their website frequently is step one. from there, see what terms they have in their meta data, where they are purchasing ads, and who is linked to them. If you want to know more, let me know and I will share with you how to dig deeper.

Wow, what a great use of two hours of my day. Even as a self proclaimed blog advocate and SEO/SEM expert, I must say that I learned quite a bit. Here were some of the key points that I found most valuable:

• Balance your blogging life: spend 1/3 of your time posting on your blog, 1/3 reading other blogs, and 1/3 commenting!
• Never use a subdomain of a blogging platform as your URL, buy a domain and install it. (I told you so!)
• Funny and Enticing Titles work best.
• Posting weekly is “the norm.”

Some of this I already knew, but sometimes it helps my clients to hear it from other people.

I must admit that these guys seem to have a really good grasp of the benefits of business blogging as well as how it will help with your company’s website SEO. If you are interested, HubSpot is doing another webinar on Social Media Marketing, April 9, 2-3PM EST

What to expect? Website Grader measures quite a few SEO characteristics, each of which is pretty important. In addition measuring the relevance of the content, the readability of the content as well as meta information, it also evaluates things like Google page rank, Alexa traffic rank, Diggs and other inbound links. Measuring, tracking and improving each of these elements will help your website (or blog) become more popular in the search engines.

Why on earth would I tell my customers about this? First of all understand that the first thing I do when evaluating a prospect customers as a good SEO client, is run their URL through Website Grader. I often print and show them the results. I have found that the information is more valuable to them, when they can see that it is coming from a non-bias, third party. Most of the time, my customers have no idea how to improve in any or all of these areas, so it helps me explain what the SEO picture looks like, without sounding too much like a “sales-guy.” Las thing is, if you find HubSpot through my site, and you decide to hire them, not me for SEO, please make sure you mention my name to them.

More about the HubSpot webinar here.

The reality of the situation is this folks, YOUR NAME is valuable, but only if you brand it correctly. Think of some famous names, Henry Ford, Blair Singer, Suze Orman. What do they have in common, they are all known throughout their industry and the world perhaps as visionaries, as experts, as someone who is reputable in their field. When people think of great automotive innovator, they think of Ford. If you are curious about improving the sales in your business, you may think of Singer. If you want to know more about finance you may think of Orman. But the question is how did they become so well known? The answer is this: they write down their thoughts and share them with other people.

“All Fords are exactly alike, but no two men are just alike. Every new life is a new thing under the sun; there has never been anything just like it before, never will be again. A young man ought to get that idea about himself; he should look for the single spark of individuality that makes him different from other folks, and develop that for all he is worth. Society and schools may try to iron it out of him; their tendency is to put it all in the same mold, but I say don’t let that spark be lost; it is your only real claim to importance.”

Henry Ford

How can you brand yourself as an expert in your field? What is the one thing that you stay awake at night pondering over? What is your passion? What do you love most? Would you be willing to write about it once a week? If so, write about it online, on a blog. Show off your passion, teach people what you know, share with the world the fantastic stories you have heard of been a part of. Who knows perhaps some day your name will be synonymous with what you do much like “inventor of the automobile,” “sales expert,” of “financial genius.”

Happy Blogging

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