Andy Wibbels, affectionately known as the “Original Blogging Evangelist” and author of BlogWild! A Guide For Small Business Blogging, is about to start his latest course, Keyword Essentials (aff).

Andy has a fun style of teaching and uses teleconference audio to deliver his strategies. His courses are a great way to introduce yourself to the basics of blogging and his latest course covers an important topic - keywords.

Keyword Essentials is all about keywords and how you can study them and manipulate them to get more targeted traffic to your blog.

The course begins on October 18 and runs every Wednesday for four weeks. You can enroll immediately and listen to the free preview call by visiting -

www.KeywordEssentials.com

Once the course is complete I’ll do my best to get a full review out for you, but given that I have enjoyed everything else Andy has produced so far that I have studied, I suspect this course won’t disappoint, especially if you currently do not study your keywords.

Technorati Tags: andy wibbels, keyword essentials
Internal Tags: andy wibbels keyword essentials

Comments(0)

I received an email from a blogger friend of mine, Andy Wibbels. He sent out a request to his newsletter for his readers to vote for his blog in an upcoming blog awards called the MarketingSherpa Awards. While the MarketingSherpa Award is no emmy, it is a good exposure and credibility tool for bloggers if you can walk away as a winner. Just being able to display the award on your blog helps to convince new visitors that your blog is worth reading.

Andy won a MarketingSherpa award in 2005 so he knows its value. For this year the competition is tough since there are so many business and marketing related blogs out there competing. Some bloggers, myself included, posted a notice to their blog asking for their readers to vote. In my case I posted a notice at Entrepreneur’s Journey and Small Business Branding. Andy though, went one step further.

Voting in the awards is not too difficult. There are many categories to choose from and a few fields to fill out but it shouldn’t take more than a minute. Andy wanted to make the process as easy as possible so he set up a simple frame based page which included a left sidebar explaining how to vote for his blog. You can see it in action here (voting for the awards has closed)-

http://andywibbels.com/sherpa/

Make The Effort

It would not have taken Andy (or his web techie) very long to set up the voting page. Andy took the small extra step to ensure it was as easy as possible for his readers to vote for him. It’s the little extra things like this that the top bloggers do to bring in more traffic that separates them from the pack. Most people wouldn’t bother, but Andy knows the value of an award and decided to work for it.

Do you go the extra mile with your blog traffic initiatives?

Technorati Tags: andy wibbels, marketingsherpa awards
Internal Tags: andy wibbels marketingsherpa awards

Comments(2)