Blogging, forum strategy

[jroberts]

Hi Steve,

As you suggested, here are my blogging questions in the forum.

1. Why is there virtually no difference between your blog and your home page? What benefit does this bring you in terms of how the search engines see you, traffic, etc?

2. With the blog getting so much more traffic than the rest of the site (perhaps with the exception of ther forums), and the fact that your blog has few of the characteristics of normal blogs, I wonder why you even need the rest. Pardon my ignorance, but I'm told that you could run all of the other features from links on the blog. Thus, I'm curious whether there is a technical reason that does you some good in terms of traffic or monetizing to have both a standard Web site and a separate blog.

3. I notice that you're tagging every post to four services. I know that every post therefore gets catalogued on each. Please tell me:

a. Has this tagging resulted in demonstrably increased traffic for you or are there other reasons you are doing it?

b. Is there any other hidden benefit from the forum in terms of SEO, other than creating community?

c. How will you monetize this?

Thanks, Steve. I'm just trying to pick up on the strategy so that I can implement the best solutions as I get set to launch a blog/site. You're obviously ahead of almost everybody on this, and I appreciate your willingness to share your information.

Best,

Jerry

[Jill]

I don't know Steve's strategy so I can't speak to that, but I can speak to forums, traffic and SEO in general.

SEO should never be the ultimate goal of your site. You don't do certain things for SEO. You do things that will benefit people so they will want to visit your site and want to tell others about it.

That in turn builds traffic and links, which in turn builds high rankings in the search engines.

None of this happens quickly, just like most good things in life.

[timmymayes]

Steve stated in one article that he didn't just have a blog because at the time he started it, and today its still true, alot of the people he is trying to reach don't know what a blog is about and he didn't want to restrict those people from having access to his material.

Cheers,
Timothy

[Alex]

Originally Posted by timmymayes

Steve stated in one article that he didn't just have a blog because at the time he started it, and today its still true, alot of the people he is trying to reach don't know what a blog is about and he didn't want to restrict those people from having access to his material.

Cheers,
Timothy

I think what JR means is that via wordpress you could set up pages to look like regular html sites www.example.com/about and not look like a blog at all. However, steve opted to not use this method and created seperate html pages for certain sections.

[Cassie]

I completely agree, Jill. It's wise to have a working knowledge of SEO and other technical aspects. But in the end it's returning visitors through quality content that will make a blog a success. The rest would fall in naturally with time, without necessarily needing to 'tweak' to fit a system.