Experienced bloggers know that over time blogs area great way to connect with your market online.  Social media platforms are good too but there are implications to consider.

First, blogs allow you to control the content.  Social media platforms come and go, so you risk the likelyhood that one day your content will disappear.  What’s more, with your own blog you control search engine optimation, user experience, and addition features you wish add to the site.  The beauty is that all your blog content can be easily shared on social networks, yet you still retain control.

Second, you can simply do more with your own blog.  You can publish content, you can share it where you like, you can customize and leverage your own RSS feed, you can add video, audio and images, you can have a newsletter, and more.  Social networks let you do some of this yet not all.  Of course, they have features that are not possible on a blog, but that list is short.

My point is your blog should serve as your single distribution point for content online.  With the right setup, you can automate much of the distribution from that point and then manage the response on the back end with other tools, such as Google Reader and Tweetdeck.

The tools will change but this point is clear for me – host everything on your own site first and distribute from there.

What’s your blogging strategy?  How has your blog helped you connect with your market?

There are many reasons why SEO is a better investment than PPC, but the most compelling one is this: SEO drives more than 75 percent of all search traffic and PPC drives less than 25 percent. In short, your opportunity is more than three times greater.

via Selling SEO Projects Against PPC Campaigns – Search Engine Watch (SEW).

Of course, this really depends heaviy on your business model and sales funnel.  For some businesses that sell directly online, PPC is a fantastic option, since you have the ability to track ROI to the penny and can quickly coorelate keyword performance with sales to tweak your PPC strategy.

For more traditional selling models, PPC is great to get initial traffic coming in, but it’s SEO that will drive long-term organic rankings and search traffic.

Furthermore, SEO tactics, such as developing great content with RSS feeds, gives you the ability to increase inbound links, where PPC is a one-shot deal with no long term impact.  Once you stop paying the traffic stops.

Take an hour today to revisit your traffic generation plan.  Consider PPC and SEO among other strategies, specifically thinking about the short and long-term goals you hope to achieve with each.

It’s still shocking that many newbies don’t understand links. You don’t need to link to a lot of Web sites. You need a lot of good Web sites to link to you. And, it’s best if you can manage to get some of those links to include — in some fashion — the keywords that describe the page they’re linking to.

For example, if I’m linking to Search Engine Watch, I would want to link using the words “Search Engine Optimization News” within the anchor text of the link. If I wanted to “deep link” (that is to say, link deeper within the Search Engine Watch Web site), I would link to the Promotion & Link Building page using the words “Link Building Resources.”

via Top Signs Your Site Isn’t Ready for Prime Time, Part 2 – Search Engine Watch (SEW).

This strategy is so critical.  I would also add that not only do you want to use your keywords in this deep linking strategy, but you should also link from sites that have a high PageRank.

For example, you could generate dozens of inbound links from sites with a Google PageRank of zero and your efforts would yield very little in-terms of SEO.  Whereas one link from a .gov or .edu site with high PageRank could significantly improve your rank.

To lean more about PageRank, check out Wikipedia on PageRank

To check the PageRank of any site, check out prchecker.