If you want to be working toward becoming an authority in your chosen market or niche, few things are more important than being keenly aware of what’s going on within it! There is always something to learn, keep up with, and chime in on with the news you need to be aware of. Not only is this a great way to stay abreast of your competition, you can also learn about new products, ads, trends, and more. Let’s look at some of the ways you can effectively do this.

Probably the simplest way to keep track of what’s going on is to create Google Alerts for any forums, groups, blogs, news items, or keywords you want followed. While this is easy to do on Google, and you do get an email alert when something you’ve tagged is mentioned or comes up,  it does get quite onerous to keep up with, particularly if you have several niches to keep an eye on.

Boardtracker is the best service for tracking at the moment. It has more than 37,000 forums programmed into it and can be customized to your needs. There is a free version (basically useless as you can only set up one alert), but they have a 30-day free trial for their premium version which bills out at $39 a month.

Another option is SocialMention, which tracks some 80 social media sites, sending you an email alert daily. This one is free; however, it does not cover individual blogs,only social media.

Your best bet may be a combination of SocialMention and Google, if you’re looking to not spend any money. Otherwise, BoardTracker is pretty comprehensive.

Whichever way you choose to go, make sure you are keeping an eye peeled for what is happening in your space. Not only will this keep you constantly learning, but it also allows you to pass this on to your visitors in the form of added value, which is something we all need to be doing more of!

If you’ve been around content marketing for an appreciable amount of time, you’ve likely heard the term linkbait tossed about. You may even think you need some, but aren’t either exactly clear about what it is or how to create it. There are some specifics involved here to make the best use of linkbait, and you’ll want to make sure you get it right or you may find the whole endeavor a disaster. Let’s take a quick look at what we need to do to make it work.

First off, a definition: Linkbait refers to a piece of content designed to be as popular and provocative as possible in order to attract a viral audience who will disseminate it even further. This, of course, has often lead to abuse where the headline does not have much, if anything, to do with the content, and is merely there to serve as an irresistible hook to get the reader to click. By not following through on the promise of the headline, however, the writer has irreparably damaged what little trust they had forged, and the reader leaves in disgust — a word to the wise.

The purpose of linkbait, of course, is to garner links and traffic to a site or blog. A well-written and strategically distributed piece of linkbait can bring thousands of both, and there is no denying the  power it can wield. You just need to make sure you use it responsibly in order not to reap the opposite effect: hundreds or thousands of readers who flee fast from what they perceive as linkbait spam. Make your linkbait pieces as valuable and interesting as you are capable of, and you’ll be properly rewarded!

The best practices involved with linkbait involve looking for ways to raise interest without hype, lies, or derogatory posts about others. Those that involve breaking news, humor, and controversy are the best and most effective linkbait strategies to employ .  Check out Darren Rowse at Problogger who has compiled a good list of 20 linkbait techniques to help you understand the best ways to create linkbait.

Links are the currency of the Web. Get a good number of them pointing to your web pages, and you’ll be rewarded with higher rankings and consequently, more of what you’re after, whether that be sales, opt-ins, or any other results.

There are basically three different types of links when it comes to your site:

1. External links – Links that are leaving your website.

2. Incoming links – Links coming into your site.

3. Internal links – Links from one page to another in your website (or blog)

All three are very important and play a big part in how well you rank. Let’s look at each one more in depth.

External Links – These links leaving your site serve several purposes. First and foremost, they should be of value to visitors on your site. If every link leaving your site is an affiliate link, Google and the other search engines see this as particularly self-serving, and not of any particular value. The best practice is to mix in truly useful links to authority sites in your market. This can be done naturally in the course of your content, especially blog posts. Something as simple as “I saw this great article on WebMD today, and it was very enlightening” can not only deliver value, but satisfy the search engines as well. Some people are of the mind to limit the number of links leaving theirsite, and there is some validity to this. You also will want to, in most cases, append the “nofollow” tag to these links, to avoid bleeding link juice. There are other cases in which you’ll want to pass link love along.

Incoming Links – This part is the most important. Incoming links to your pages are considered “votes” for your pages, and thus help them rank higher in the eyes of the search engines. There should be a variety of keywords used as incoming links; not only your primary keywords, but also a smattering of your site’s naked www. URL, and a few “click here” as well. This is viewed as a natural linking pattern. Nobody naturally ranks for only one keyword phrase, and if you were to try and structure it thus, it may be seen as keyword spamming and you will be penalized. Go for a variety, and not thousands of them at once, and you’ll be fine.

Internal Links - Links within your site pointing to other pages have taken on a greater significance, and value. Try to link from the text if possible, and not only from a navigation bar. Google prizes contextual links more highly and these links will be seen as aids to your visitors in getting around your site, and thus rewarded. Don’t leave all your site links in the NavBar!

How to Create A Live HTML link

Here is the code necessary to make a link live on your pages. This also works in blog posts, though you can also often use the WYSIWYG (what you see if what you get) editor to put a link in. Make sure to use this exact code, with no additional spaces or characters; it DOES make a difference!

<a href=”http://www.contentdivas.com”>Article Marketing</a>

This will show on the page as Article Marketing, and will be credited to your site profile as a vote for your site with that keyword, giving the search engines an idea of what you’re about. Get enough incoming backlinks with that keyword, and pretty soon you’ll be ranking for it. The part that shows up on the web page is called “anchor text.”

Many times simply inserting your naked URL http://www.contentdivas.com will make that link operational. If you like to “pretty” it up a bit, you can use the previous format and change the anchor text part to this:

<a href=”http://www.contentdivas.com”>www.ContentDivas.com</a>

and it will show as www.ContentDivas.com

Next time we’ll go into some link building strategies and how you can use content marketing to enhance your site’s link profile.

Just when we thought our favorite social bookmarking tool couldn’t get any better, it did! SocialAdr now pings each social bookmark that is done for you, at no extra charge and with no input or work from you at all! (I like that!)

For those of you who don’t understand why this is a good thing many times over, let me explain what a ping is, and why you want this done. A ping is little more than an electronic notification of various ping services that there is new content here worth taking a look at. This notifies the search engines, which, in turn, come around a lot quicker than they normally might, thus getting your pages spidered and  hopefully indexed a lot faster! That’s why this is a good thing!

And to have it done free, with no labor or tools to buy or implement on your part, that makes SocialAdr even more of a no-brainer!

And on top if this, they are currently running a 5-day $1 trial for their paid,  do it all for you service!

What in the world are you waiting for?

You may have heard the term “RSS” and wondered exactly what it means and how this can help you with your marketing efforts. The answer is that it is VERY helpful if you explore what they can do for you.

RSS stands for “really simple syndication” and basically it is a delivery channel of your site’s content to your subscribers in the form of a readable XML file that readers can access through RSS readers and most newer web browsers. What this means is that you can keep your audience constantly updated on anything new on your blog or site instantly and without the hassles associated with other forms of delivery such as email.

Once your readers subscribe to your feed, it comes to them either in the form of a summary with a link to the rest of the post or the entire post itself. This is a terrific way to keep your readers abreast of your activities and communicate and publicize events in your business.

Some of the ways marketers employ RSS feeds are:

• Direct marketing
• Newsletter publishing
• Public relations
• Advertising
• Lead generation
• Online publishing
• E-commerce
• and many more!

If you have a blog, you have an RSS feed already at your disposal, and it can be located either on your page itself or in your browser’s address bar. Look for the orange icon, click on it and you’ll see how your users can subscribe to your feed.

If you have a static HTML site, you can create an RSS feed for any page on it. A useful site to help with this is Dapper.net where you can create your own feeds for free.

The best thing about RSS feeds for marketing purposes is that they are updated instantly when you’re site is updated. The search engines, in particular Google and Yahoo, spider the RSS directories several times a day, making RSS a great way to get your pages indexed in the search engines.

Another good way to employ RSS feeds is to create custom feeds of all your relevant feeds. This “super feed” can be submitted to the RSS feed directories as well, helping to ensure your pages are found and indexed. A cool free site that helps create this mashup is RSSMix.com.

There are quite a few RSS feed directories out there. Here is a partial list:

http://www.blogdigger.com/add.jsp (PR7)
http://www.blogpulse.com/submit.html (PR7)
http://www.feedage.com (PR6)
http://www.2rss.com (PR6)
http://www.blogstreet.com/bsibin/add.cgi (PR6)
http://publisher.yahoo.com/rss_guide/submit.php (PR6)
http://www.plazoo.com/en/addrss.asp (PR6)
http://www.feedbite.com (PR5)
http://www.rssfeeds.com (PR5)
http://feedraider.com/ (PR5)
http://www.feedsubmitter.com/ (PR5)
http://purerss.com/addfeed.php?catid= (PR5)
http://www.unclefeed.com/rss/addfeed.html (PR4)
http://www.feedsee.com/submit.html (PR4)
http://www.feed24.com/?c=add (PR3)
http://www.feedfury.com/ (PR3)
http://www.goldenfeed.com/AddFeed.aspx (PR3)
http://www.feedooyoo.com/ref.htm (PR3)
http://www.feedest.com/feedAdd.cfm (PR3)
http://www.rssmad.com (PR3)

http://www.feedbase.net/Add.php

http://www.rssmicro.com/?m=fs#theForm

http://www.rssmotron.com/feed_eater.php

You can submit individually or use a tool that helps automate some of the drudgery of the submission process. You can also outsource this. If you do it yourself, you only need to open an account at each of the directories and begin submitting.

Using RSS feeds is a terrific way to not only get your pages indexed fast, but keep your content in front of your readers, which goes a long way toward helping you build authority and traffic to your sites.