Blogging For Traffic Credibility and Sales

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Male Announcer: Welcome to ShermanLive.com! Featuring interviews and seminars, in-depth, intelligent, in right now, on ShermanLive.com. Here's Sherman Hu!

Sherman Hu: Hi there. This is Sherman Hu with ShermanLive.com. You're about to listen to a podcast interview conducted by the lovely and intelligent Heather Vale of Elite Sessions. Now, Heather organized this interview with me after we connected online at MySpace. So MySpace has really paid off for both Heather and I in this situation.

Now, what was unique about this call was it was scheduled for 60 minutes, an hour. [laughs] It turned into an hour and a half call. And I have to credit Heather for her brilliant questions, due in large part to her research on me and my expertise. Plus, her years of hosting talk shows really paid off, as she effectively uncovered a host of my solid strategies, even secrets I hold close to my vest. And the audience also had a ton of questions and we fielded as many as we could.

So you're in for a treat on this call. If you can, download the podcast to your computer, transfer it to your iPod, listen to it when you're driving, or on your treadmill, or in the shower. Well, maybe not in the shower, unless you have a waterproof case for your iPod.

Well, sit up, stay tuned, and check out this podcast interview, titled, "Solid Strategies In Blogging For Traffic, Credibility and Sales."

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Female Announcer: Welcome to Elite Sessions, Brad Callen's Elite Training Series on SEO, keyword research, and marketing in general. Here's your host, Heather Vale.

Heather Vale: Hey there, everybody. Tonight on Elite Sessions, we've got an exciting call about using blogs, podcasts, and other high-tech and multimedia techniques to increase your SEO and sales efforts. And our guest is none other than Sherman Hu of Wordpress Tutorials and StomperNet.

Sherman is known as one of the top blogging experts online today, and his strengths include simplifying and demystifying technologies like these so people can better put them to use to profit from their online businesses. And, by the way, Sherman was the one who came up with the name, Elite Sessions, for this series. Sherman, thanks for being here today.

Sherman: Hey, you're welcome. [laughs] That was great. Brad took that advice. [laughs]

Heather: He did. He liked your whole list, and that was his favorite one. So there you go, the naming of a teleseminar series. [laughs]

Sherman: Yeah. Well, you know what? Thanks for inviting me to be on the call, Heather. I really appreciate chatting with you. And I think this is the first time we've actually chatted live.

Heather: Yeah, it is.

Sherman: I'm used to kind of being online, and email back and forth, and seeing you on MySpace, and it's been fun.

Heather: [laughs] Well, see, that's the funny thing about Internet is you can get to know someone in print...

Sherman: Yeah.

Heather: You never end up speaking, for the longest time.

Sherman: Yeah, I think the first time I heard your voice was on your own podcast shows. I think that was your own series at that time.

Heather: Yes, I am a podcaster. And that's one of the topics we're talking about tonight. Funny thing, though: I never started out calling myself a podcaster. I always just said I had an online radio show or that kind of thing. But now I've finally embraced that podcasting term. [laughs]

Sherman: One with the pod. [laughs]

Heather: Yeah. [laughs] So, Sherman, give us a little bit of a background. How exactly did you get started in this whole Internet business?

Sherman: I think I was forced into it.

Heather: Forced?

Sherman: Not really forced. But I remember being in corporate sales for about seven years. The last gig I had was working for Corey Rudl's office. Corey Rudl, of course, has passed away, from a race car accident. But at that time, I was working for his company for nine months, inside sales, both on the phones and email and instant messaging, helping his customers learn more about the products and help them happily own those products.

And at that time, we had a falling out, and a client said to me, "Hey, Sherman, don't go get another job. We want you build 20 websites and promote it for us." And that got my start into SEO, and it started with my small little home-based company. And I was sharing this with somebody today that I've never had to promote, or invest money to promote, my SEO services, which I've been blessed with because everything has been through word of mouth. And then I got connected with John Alexander and Robin Knowles from the surgeons and workshops.com, was certified and the certification wasn't as important to me as the connections.

I got connected with Michael Campbell at that time who is a mentor of mine. In 2004-ish I started blogging. By that time I was really tired, I was almost I think burnt out with all the SEO clients I had. He said Sherman, take the red pill, go down the rabbit trail and create your own product of what you know best, what you know really well, which is blogging. So that's what I did.

In January 2006 I launched Wordpresstutorials.com. And I've had a great time with building my platform and building my SME, subject matter expertise, in this arena of blogging and demystifying blogging for business owners to profit using the open source platform called Wordpress.

Heather: How exactly did that quest to learn SEO develop into becoming a blogging expert in particular?

Sherman: Good question. Because search marketing involves helping my clients get page one results in competitive arenas, that involved not only deploying strategies that I knew at the time, but also researching anything cutting edge that would help speed up the indexing of client sites, attracting links and inbound links and getting better rankings in link popularity, improving link relevancy and all that good stuff.

So blogging came to play, at that time, in 04 and I know that colleagues of mine were having decent results with it. And I jumped on board using Blogger at first. I was using the part of Blogger that you could set up and your URL was whatever.blogspot.com. Then I realized that Blogger had a feature to FTP, or transfer your files to your own host. I started doing that for my clients so they could keep consistent with the branding. So it would be something like clientsdomainname.com/blog and their Blogger blog would be hosted there.

What I realized was that I was getting a lot of great results with the engines coming really quickly. What used to take maybe three months for the engines to come index a traditional html site would take within the same week, if not the same day for the engines to come crawling. In looking at the statistics I thought if I can do this for a subdirectory why don't I do this for the entire site?

So I would start creating sites that the entire thing was a Blogger blog and I would FTP the files up. It got frustrating dealing with the lack of comprehensive features that google offered at that time. There was no default categorization so you couldn't add categories easily, you had to go into the code, and there were a few other things that were just kind of geeky. Very core oriented. So I started researching for a better platform and everything sort of moved me in the direction of Wordpress. Then I started going to town and having fun with Wordpress.

Heather: OK, let's talk a little bit about the different options for blogs. Because I've interviewed people who say always go with the Blogger blog because then you can have links back to your main website from an external site. And then, for instance Rosalyn Gardner, neighbor of yours, says always go for the blogs that are on your own domain, not just for the branding reasons that you talked about, but she feels that that helps raise her profile in the search engines overall.

Sherman: Correct, correct.

Heather: So what are the pros and cons of having a blog on your site or away from your site?

Sherman: Referencing back to the first thing that you said about having a third party host a blog, and there are various companies that offer that. There's Blogger, even Wordpress has one. It's located at Wordpress.com. And I believe TypePad is such a company too.

Then there are the self-hosted blogs where you have Wordpress. You can host it at your own host company, Moveable Type, and such like that.

Now, it works either way. You can have it eternally. You can have it internally. Just like Roselyn mentioned. If you have it on your own host you keep consistent with your branding. From the blog, if it can attract the engines really well, which it does, and it can attract real visitor traffic, which it does, and you can actually build your platform, build your credibility, and all the good stuff that comes with blogging involving your visitors to dialogue with you and feedback on your thoughts, your articles, your blog posts.

But, from a search engine perspective, if you have a static home page, a static site, and then you have a blog on a subdirectory, the blog can actually link to internal pages for your static site. And not only bring awareness to visitors, but also drive the search engine robots over to those internal pages. And maybe index it if it has not been indexed yet, index it faster. And it will actually boost the link popularity of your static pages with the number of blog posts that point to those pages. But it will also improve the link relevance.

Meaning if you have a blog post that points to your static page, and your static page was about funky blue widgets, and the anchor text from your blog post would link to that static page, and it would say "Funky blue widgets." That would improve your link relevance of that static page instead of a link that says "Click here."

And so, if you have multiple blog posts that point to that internal page that says "Funky blue widgets," that static page will improve in its link popularity and link relevance, which would, of course, boost your rankings up in the search engines.

So, from a real visitor standpoint of feedback on your site, improving your branding, your platform, search engine traffic, those are some of the reasons why I recommend having a blog on your site, on your domain, in a subdirectory.

Now, if you want to have a blog externally that's fine because that will actually boost your one-way incoming links from the blog to your static site. So, having one-way incoming links is always a good thing, especially if it's coming from an external site, especially if it's from an authority site.

I just feel that if you're just going to have one blog and you're going to connect it to your static site, I would more often than not I would connect it on the same domain than externally. Does that make sense, Heather?

Heather: Well, yeah. But doesn't the search engine know when it's spidering your pages that "Hey, this guy is just linking to another page on the same site." So that doesn't really count.

Sherman: I believe it counts, because I recently went through an entire site overhaul with Wordpresstutorials.com. And I had about half a dozen to ten new pages that were static HTML pages. And I have, of course, my blog which is quite mature now. And I would link to the static pages from the blog. And the engines came very quickly to index those pages.

And those pages count because I can see in my backlinks of the internal pages that I have links coming from the blog to the static pages. So, they definitely do count. They definitely help in indexing real quickly.

At the same time I want to state that in deploying any search marketing campaigns with my clients, I tell my clients all the time that I'll spend only 20 percent of my time onsite, and I'll spend the rest of my time, 80 percent of the time, offsite with getting one-way incoming links from authority sites.

So, I think that kind of falls in line with what you're saying with the external links coming into the site. I would spend most of my time getting those one-way incoming links than fussing with a lot of the stuff that happens on the site.

Heather: When you say incoming links from authority sites, would Blogger.com or Blogspot, whatever it ends up, does that count as an authority site?

Sherman: Yeah, I guess you can call it that. I mean, Blogger gets a lot of traffic. When you setup a Blogspot blog there if it gets picked up by, I think the default blog directory is web.log I think if I'm not mistaken, but Blogger picks it up real quickly and indexes it. And then you can have a link back to you from the Blogspot blog.

Now, my issue with Blogger or Wordpress.com comes from personal experiences, and also experiences from my colleagues, where they would get their accounts shutdown by Blogger or now Wordpress.com. Wordpress.com has very strict rules about not monetizing your blogs there. No blatant commercialism.

And with Blogger, Google is the big brother, so they could really do anything they want as far as taking your blog down if they find that you're doing whatever that is not following with the Terms and Conditions.

I just think that I've I'm going to invest time in either writing articles, or writing blog posts, or even ghost writing it with my virtual assistants, that I don't want my efforts going to waste if a company has the authority to just on a whim just dump your blog.

I mean, in my search marketing campaigns for my clients, I don't set up Blogger blogs at all. I used to. Now I don't ever because there are just so many more authority sites out there that you can play with. Be it in the social media space. Be it in the article marketing space or PR. marketing, even podcasting, videocasting.

There are a lot of other authority sites that have great traffic, great PageRank, the engines love them--they go to them all the time. And to create your credibility in some of these external sites that link to your static site--if you have a static site. I think there are a lot of players out there to play with. And Blogger is just not one of them that I choose to work with.

Heather: OK. So, I want to talk to you about the authority sites. But before we move on to that, if I were to going to have both a Blogger blog or whatever, LiveJournal.com, whatever blogging external site I used, as well as one on my own site--trying to play all the cards and get the best of both worlds--if I posted the exact same post on both blogs, is that a duplicate content penalty that will destroy my SEO efforts?

Sherman: I would tend to lean towards not doing it. And I know there are a lot of discussions out there about duplicate content. And I asked one of my mentors one time about this and he had mentioned that the duplicate content... I mean, it takes a lot of resources for an engine like Google to really try to detect duplicate content. Who posted it first? Who posted it after? Who created that content?

And I think some of the telltale signs of an article could be the article resource box. And it could be even the hyperlink at the bottom of the article. And so, he says it's very grey as far as duplicate content. It takes a lot of resources.

So, one doesn't really need to fuss too much about it. Just make sure that if you have similar content just change some of the content, change the resource box at the bottom, and you're good to go.

Regarding to your question, Heather, if you're going to have the same content on Blogger as in your Wordpress blog on your site, I don't think I'm in a position to be able to intellectually comment on that. I just know that I generally don't do it, just in case.

So if I post something, an article on my site or my blog, if I need to post something similar somewhere else, I'll tweak it. I'll change the title of the article, I'll change some of the content, I'll change some of the stuff at the bottom, the resource box, just to be on the safe side.

Heather: Right.

Sherman: Yeah. I hope that sort of answers your question.

Heather: Yeah, yeah. Definitely. OK, so you're talking about getting incoming links from authority sites. What constitutes an authority site and how do we get an incoming link?

Sherman: My personal definition or explanation of what I have in mind as far as an authority site is a site that has a lot of traffic, both searching traffic and visitor traffic. It's a very populated site. It's something that has maybe possibly a high page rank.

It's commonly ranked well on search engines when you do searches for different types of terms, and one such site could be Squidoo, a social media space. Another one could be Fwicki, which is a fairly recent player, but they're doing very well in the rankings.

Fwicki is F-W-I-C-K-I, and it's co-owned by a good friend of mine. They're doing really well with Google, and Google has been in touch with them to work out some sort of API thing so they can tie into Google better or something like that. I'm thinking of sites like article marketing sites like ezinearticles.com.

They, of course, have different podcast directories out there that are authority sites, and so they're well trafficked by visitors and the robots and you can see them ranked well quite often. Those are the ones that I would tend to lean towards having a link coming from those sites.

So for example, if you want to get a link coming back from ezinearticles.com, you would create an article, post it to them, publish it to them, and in your resource box you would have a link back to your site leading to a home page, or internal page, or landing page. That's how you'd get a link from there.

Squidoo.com, you would create an account, and you'd create a Squidoo page. It would not only help you with a link back, but you can also help build your credibility with the kind of content that you post there. So these are authority sites that rank well on the search engines that if you create a new page on their site, the site will be picked up and indexed very quickly.

It will bleed page rank to those pages, and over a short period of time, when you do a back search on the sites, you'll see that those are the links that actually will point to you. They all add to you improving your link popularity, your link relevancy, and your rankings and your positioning in the search engines.

Heather: So all of those are as simple as publishing your own content elsewhere, just putting it on the right sites.

Sherman: Correct, correct. Before, the strategy was create as many sites of blogs in your ring around your main site. Well, you can do that. However, you're starting those sites from scratch - even the ones around your ring. Even if you have a second or third tier ring around those primary rings, you're still starting out with zero page rank sites.

So if you're going to manufacture your own network of sites or manufacture and boost your own link popularity, why not do it with sites that are already mature in the search results that Google favors. You can get those pages that you create there entrenched in rank faster than with your own created sites. That's what I do for myself and that's what I do for my clients. The results are astounding.

Heather: We were talking earlier about MySpace. Have you played at all with MySpace in terms of SEO back to your site?

Sherman: I have that linked that back to my site. I can't say that I have studied or really dived and peeped into making MySpace a good ROI for what I do. There's just one more authority site that I would publish information to and it's a good hang out place. A lot of my friends on that space, we're not talking about just Internet marketing connections, we're talking about friends, good friends and friends who are in different walks of life and sectors, industries.

If you go to MySpace [laughter], at myspace.com/sherman, you'll see that I have a lot of actors and singers connected as friends. I think it's kind of fun to do that, but I have a link back to my blog, my sites from MySpace and I used it as just one more tool, one more authority site. I don't know...how about you? I know you're everywhere on MySpace, Heather [laughter] so do you get results with it?

Heather: You know I started booking interviews; actually I booked this one through MySpace.

Sherman: Yeah, that's right. We connected through MySpace.

Heather: Yeah.

Sherman: There you go.

Heather: I mean I have my MySpace space for a good year and a half before I actually started doing anything with it, but once I started connecting to people I booked like 10 interviews. People that I could not get before that I've been trying for a year just...bang.

Sherman: Amazing.

Heather: Yeah, no problem. [laughter]

Sherman: Amazing. That's great. Let me share it to you. A couple...OK, let me share it with the audience listening why it's so important to take advantage of the authority sites where people hang out.

I posted nine videos on Google Video. The results were good. Trickle, Urinara wasn't an avalanche of traffic, but Ken McCarthy for the System Center found me on there. He viewed my videos; he was really impressed and invited me to come speak last year at the system seminar.

Well, that's been a phenomenal for my networking connections and business. It came from there and we can definitely pay for ourselves. So whether Google Video or MySpace, with Heather's example of connecting and booking 10 interviews, it's phenomenal. Whether you get links back or you get phone calls or emails from people that you connect with, it's great to leverage these authority sites and platforms.

Heather: So can we talk a little bit about why exactly search engines like blogs so much. I mean obviously its updated contents so they like that, but you could put a ton of HTML pages up and keep updating the content that way. So what is it about the blogs?

Sherman: One point...I mean in my mind there are two things, but one is exactly what you said. Bloggers tend to update the content on the blogs fairly regularly and sometimes multiple times a day. Google's main audience are you and I, where we use the engine and they want to make sure that we're happy, providing us with relevant results and so if Google is looking for fresh content all the time, if bloggers add fresh content to the blog all the time, it's a good marriage. That's one.

The other thing that I can think of is Wordpress for example has a feature called Update Services, something called 'pinging.' Basically, when you post a new entry your blog will automatically 'ping' or knock on the door or update the blog directories and engines that get new content, fresh content and they get invited to your blog to crawl for the content. This speeds up your indexing because they get notified or get pinged of the fresh content.

So that's the other reason why blogs are Google's best friend compared to static sites.

I believe the other reason, too, is because of the way it's coded. Blogs have RSS feeds, and these feeds are basically text code in a format called XML. And the code is really friendly to the engines. It's really just pure text and code of the content. There's no code in there for Flash or images, that kind of stuff, it's just pure text. And so the engines just suck it up like there's no tomorrow.

So those are some of the reasons why the blogs work really well, in attracting the engines.

Heather: Are there any changes that can be made to an RSS feed to make it more attractive, either to the search engines or to visitors in general?

Sherman: Well, it's already very attractive to the engines. But I would think that, to a visitor, in a blog, a visitor can come to your blog and subscribe to your blog feed, which means they can subscribe. Just like a magazine subscription, you just subscribe to and read it from your favorite blog reader.

So, for example, Bloglines is one of them. Google has a blog reader, too. And so, if you have 20 blogs that you want to be updated with the content, instead of going to 20 different sites, you can just open up your blog reader and read the latest fresh content from all the 20 sites.

Now, what would make it more attractive to a visitor, from a blog owner's standpoint, is to write good content, first of all.

But as a blog owner, if I want to attract a visitor to my site, whether because I have AdSense ads on it and I want to encourage them to come to my site with the potential that they would click on an ad to improve the revenue and monetization of my blog, or because I just want them to come to my blog and just be exposed to all the different things going on, then I would make my feed a summary feed instead of a full feed.

So when your reader reads your blog in their blog reader, they will only see maybe the first paragraph, and then they would need to click on a link to read the rest of the article on your blog. And that would actually encourage them to come over to your blog more so than if you had the full article in their blog reader to read. Because if they can read the whole article, they don't need to come to your blog. So hopefully that makes sense.

Heather: How do you make it a summary feed?

Sherman: You can use, for example, FeedBurner is one such company that you can... It's free to sign up with FeedBurner. You can sign up for an account at FeedBurner, and you would set up a setting so that your Wordpress blog feed, which is typically YourDomainName.com/feed, would be replaced with the FeedBurner feed. So it's a long URL. And in the settings, you can choose to make each entry, each blog post, a summary feed instead of a full feed. OK? That's one way to do it.

Heather: OK.

Sherman: Have you done it that way, Heather?

Heather: I've never made it a summary feed, no.

Sherman: Oh, OK. Yeah, I typically leave it alone. But you can do that. You can make that a summary feed, and that would encourage visitors to come read the rest of the article.

Heather: OK. Now, you mentioned that some of the hardcore bloggers are updating their content several times a day. How often should we be blogging?

Sherman: I think one should blog as often as he has something good to say. [laughs]

Heather: [laughs]

Sherman: Don't blog for just because.

Heather: Now you're going to scare people. They're like, "I've got nothing good to say! I can't post anything!" [laughs]

Sherman: [laughs] Yeah, exactly. Well, there's so many things to blog about, actually. This is a situation where it's "Do what I say, don't do what I do." [laughs]

Heather: OK. [laughs]

Sherman: Because at wordpresstutorials.com/blog, I have my blog there, of course. And the potential to blog could be huge. I mean, I could blog about happenings, news, trends, what's happening with Wordpress or the blogging sphere -- blogosphere. I can blog about techniques. I can blog about tips. I can blog about the latest techniques about how you add audio, video, pictures, images, to your Wordpress blog.

I could have interviews with other bloggers that use Wordpress. There's so many things to write about, and so you can really go crazy. There are a lot of things you can do. Heather, help remember to talk about pre-scheduling and post-scheduling entries, OK?

Heather: OK.

Sherman: Because that's a good strategy. So there's really no reason to say "I have nothing to write about". If you really have nothing to write about, then go to some of the news sites, like Google News, Yahoo News, and type in your industry's main search terms, and see what the latest news is about your industry, then write about it. You can maybe write your thoughts and opinions on that article, with a link back to that article if you want, or you can summarize the article or the thought, and then comment on it. At least add some personal touch to it.

One thing I recommend you do is actually have your visitors give their feedback and their comments on what you just wrote about. So, "I just wrote about this, I would love to know what you'd do in this situation, or what you think about this news topic, and just feel free to enter your comments in the comment box below". This would then begin your dialog with your visitors. It's amazing when you start having one or two people comment, you'll start having this herd mentality; it's social proof that "Hey, people are actually talking about this here, so let's comment too".

I've had different blog entries where I had 20, 30, 50 people commenting on it because it was such an interesting or controversial topic. I want to piggyback on that. When you start realizing there's a lot to talk about and blog about, you don't actually have to blog about it fives times a day. If you have great stuff to write about, why don't you create five separate entries, and then pre-schedule or post-date it for the next five days. So that you have content that gets published every day, for the next five days.

It not only shows that you're blogging daily to your visitors, they think "Oh, OK, he's active in his blog, or she's active in her blog," but you actually train the engines to come on a regular basis, or a regular pattern, or a regular schedule. I have a good friend, Dave Taylor at askdavetaylor.com, who would do that. He would write five to seven entries ahead of time, and he would pre-schedule them. It looks like he's posting every day, but really he's done it once. Sometimes before he goes away on vacation, he'll post seven or ten days ahead of time. When he's on vacation, he doesn't touch his blogs, but it looks like he's posting every day.

Heather: So you could even, if you had one long thing that you wanted to post, just specifically break it up... "part two coming tomorrow, part three coming tomorrow".

Sherman: Yes, yes, yes. It could be a ten part piece that you could just post for every day. And Heather, in your example of being able to book ten interviews, if you do all the interviews today, for example, and you have all the podcasts ready, you could pre-schedule them to come out one a day, and you don't need to sit at your computer every day to do it. So it's just maximizing your time.

Heather: Cool. You mentioned in there getting people to comment. Does having more comments affect our search engine optimization at all?

Sherman: Yes and no. The comments help to add content to that page. Typically when a visitor would comment, they would use, naturally, the important key phrases about that page's topic. That might help. It could lend towards improved search results, or it could not. I know that in the past, I've Googled for a relevant search term, and I've found the site that I'm trying to look for through somebody who commented.

In my situation, I've done it for myself, where I found my own site through somebody's comments on my blog. So it can actually help, especially if it's long-tail, obscure terms. But anything helps - it's just an additional gateway or entry point into your site.

I give my clients the example of when you have a new mall. You wouldn't create just one entry way. You would have your east, west and south entry points and maybe some other ones into the mall. So that more visitors are coming in from different parts of the mall. That's the same thing what you would do for your site, just offering additional gateways and different entry points. So comments do help. They can or maybe they can not, but they helped in my situation before.

Heather: And it helps to build a community as well.

Sherman: Exactly. It's phenomenal and actually very motivating when you have somebody commenting on your post. Whether it's good or not. Of course you can moderate all the comments. If you have some dork, which chooses to use profanity, you can moderate it out so that it doesn't even publish and show. The comments are great, I'm talking about people that actually legitimately post something valuable, I'm not talking about somebody that says "Great post!" and in their name they have their keyword that links back to their site.

Heather: [giggles]

Sherman: That person is just looking for a link back to their site. I usually don't OK those posts either as comments. I look for people that are trying to add some value and have a dialog. One of the things I do on my blog, I noticed a lot of bloggers don't reply in their comment thread to people that comment on their blog. I tend to do that. I reply to as many as I can, to let them know that I've heard, I appreciate your voice, I appreciate you speaking up, so here I am replying to the same thread. And that's just a practice of mine, and I think it helps build a community as you said.

Heather: So once the blog is in the search engine, the pinging lets the search engines know it's been updated. But in the first place, when you just first launch a blog. Do we have to submit it to the search engines like we used to?

Sherman: No, if you are using Wordpress, the update services automatically pings Ping-o-Matic. And Ping-o-Matic has, I think, a half a dozen or more engines it notifies. One of them being Google, Yahoo and some of these major ones. So just post, and go ahead to add content to your blog. It will automatically update and ping the engines to come crawling. So you don't need to submit your site to the engines as you used to. It's really pretty hands-free.

We are talking about building yourself a schedule, a habit of blogging. But also to remember to do things outside of your blog, to start bringing in traffic and exposure. One of the ways is, finding authority sites or authority blogs in your space. Just read what they are saying, and when you come across a post that you believe you can add value to that dialog, go a head and add some content. In the name field don't add a keyword, but just add your name. In the body of the comment, you can try to anchor text once, but don't do it lamely. Basically it's the fine art of trying to get PR, without trying getting PR.

Add content and add value to somebody else. It benefits them and their audience, it gives them content. That's how I met Suzanne Falter-Barns, who's a PR-queen. She had different topics that she talked about. I started adding value in my comments on her blog, we are talking about pretty long comments. And I would do that several times. Then she got to know me, we've build a relationship from there; she's a really good acquaintance now and she's a high profile blogger too. That would give you exposure and that would give you linked love from their blogs. That's one way to do it.

The other thing is just go to the authority blogs and post your articles at Ezine Articles. Set up a page at Squidoo. Set up a MySpace page. Create a podcast if you want. And have links back from different podcast directories. So, those are all the different strategies to get some good rankings and good exposure.

Heather: Well, it sounds like the search engines are going to like our blog regardless of what the content contains. I mean, as long as it's legible. As long as it's an actual article. But, if we want to increase our efforts, how would we optimize the pages so that we know we're ranking as high as possible for any given keyword or search term?

Sherman: Oh, that's a good one, Heather. Generally, I would use my primarily and/or secondary search terms in the title of my post, relevant to that pages topic or subtopic. I would also use my primary and/or secondary search terms in maybe the first or second paragraph. Just in describing what I'm about to describe in my post.

And that would lend towards your keyword density being on track. The relevance of the topic. You know, being on point on what your blog is about or what you're trying to rank for.

And, you could anchor text in another part of your site or another part of you blog with important search terms. So, you kind of create a network of interlinking within your blog and site with the appropriate search terms.

So, for example, if I'm creating a blog about dogs and internally... Sorry. So, I have a category called Dog Books. And I have another category called Dog Videos. If I'm writing a new post in Dog Books in the title of the post I would say something like "New Dog Book Published." Or something like that. I'm just making it up.

And then in the body you would write about the book in the body. And you could at the bottom of the post write something about "Click here to review my video review about this new dog book." And then you anchor text the important search terms there to link back to that video page into other categories for Dog Video.

So that way you're just interlinking all your internal pages in your blog together with the appropriate search terms. And, hopefully that answers your question, Heather. But, basically using primary and secondary search terms for your blog post.

Heather: What kind of research do you do to find those keywords and search terms in the first place so you know you're optimizing for something that people are actually looking for?

Sherman: That's good. I mean, we're talking to an audience here who are familiar with Keyword Elite and SEO Elite. I would use those tools to either create a keyword list in Keyword Elite, or to basically select a keyword list, or analyze your competitors for the keywords for that topic, or if you're using SEO Elite, you can find out... I'm not exactly sure which one I would find. Oh yeah, number seven. In SEO Elite I would probably use number seven to find possible authority websites, and look at some of the keywords they are using.

And then I would compile my keywords into different subsets. Anything that's kind of similar I kind of group it together. And that would give me an idea about what people are looking for online. And I would create appropriate categories in my Wordpress blog using some of those terms or keywords. And that would help as far as how I'm going to flesh out my blog.

That's what I would do. I would do some research, and start posting entries in regard to those topics because you know those phrases are in demand online. And yeah, that's what I would do.

Heather: What kind of preference have you noticed from the search engines towards blogs versus podcasts versus videocasts?

Sherman: Preferencing, huh?

Heather: Do you equally like them all the same. You put up a blog you put up a podcast you get the same amount of beneficial treatment from the search engines or do they say ooh podcast that's way better than a blog.

Sherman: Hmmm. Not so sure Heather. I think based on what the engines like to crawl and they like to crawl text. That blogs might be easier for them. However with podcasts I wouldn't put a podcast audio, you know a stream just on its own with no text around it.

I would have podcast I would use primary and secondary search terms and entitled the post. I would add a one paragraph into what the podcast is about with using important terms in the paragraph. I would use different podcast tags about what that podcast is about. Hopefully it has some relevant terms in there to my topic.

That would help when the engines come crawling. Pod casting is an interesting animal and I'm definitely getting to that a lot more but podcasting is a great way for you to build quite the audience in platform too.

And heather you can speak more to this than anybody. But the fact that you have a podcast feed at iTunes, you're going to have quite a global audience there and at different podcast directories.

I know that I set up a God cast for a church. Its terribly coined for podcasting religious messages. But I remember I set up this God cast for priestsonline.org. I had set up an iTunes feed for them.

It's pretty incredible because I also publish a different podcast directories than what I did on Google searching for the individual messages. A lot of these podcast directories and such came up high in the rankings.

So I would consider them authority sites too. You want to get your word out to them and they would offer of course links back to your original podcast page or blog or whatever the case might be.

But I would not discount them for sure. Yes, so if you ever workers with blogs you can add audio very easily to your blogs you can add videos very easily to your blogs. And if you have a podcast feed I would submit it to several podcast directories.

Use your keywords wisely and you would go to get some good search engine rankings pointing back to you too from there.

Heather: What is the best way to use Wordpress in order to publish a podcast whether it's an audio or video podcast?

Sherman: Best way to use Wordpress? Well go about it by several ways. If you have a static site and you care not to have a blog where you really type anything. Then you can make you're entire Wordpress blog at your domain name dot com slash blog to be the entire podcast page or section.

You actually wouldn't even have to call it a blog you could call it domain name dot com slash podcast and the entire thing is a blog of course but everything in there is a podcast entry. So that's one way to do it.

The other way to do it is if you have a blog already at domain name dot com slash blog you can create a category called your topic keywords podcast. So if I've got a dog blog then I could call it dog.com/blog and in there I'll have a category called "doggie podcast." In that category I'll have my running podcast entries.

You can use plug-ins. Plug-ins are modules of code that you can attach to your Wordpress blog in activating that plug-in. Once the plug-in is pod pressed, which makes it easy to enter the settings for iTunes, for example, and you can then make your podcast entry.

If you want to make it easy to add audio, you might also want to do some research. I think Podpress actually uses that a plug-in. There's a "one pixel out" audio podcasting. Just do a Google search for "one pixel out." They have a podcasting plug-in that you can use.

Basically, all you do when you set it up is just enter the path to your mp3 on your host and it will create a flash player button. When you click on that play button, your audio will start streaming right away. And you can also do it so that you can have an mp3 download link below that flash player so that your visitors can download your message or they can click, play and stream it there. Those are some of the plug-ins that I would use with Wordpress for possible audio for podcasting.

Heather: OK. You had mentioned adding AdSense code or somehow putting Adsense on your blog in order to make money from that, but a lot of people that I have talked to about blogging and podcasting want to know how to make money with it beyond the AdSense. What are your favorite ways?

Sherman: Well, my current ways are actually having a product. That is one way. There is another way, although, I don't think it's a stable business model. There are advertising opportunities that I suggested before getting this call. We got an email from a girl who is maybe a manager from a type of ad network. She says that she has been observing my blogs a while, and she thinks it's a great site for ads opportunities. And she wants to know my traffic, impression, clicks and all those stuff, and she's in agreement with me in terms of ad space.

I don't necessarily like those because I want to know what ads would show up on my blog because those ads, even though I get paid for it, that drives a visitor away from my blog. And I want to keep them there so they can partake in my offerings.

So, one is ads opportunity. Of course, tech link ads, I see a lot of out there advertising different Bloggers' blogs. It can be an affiliate marketing-based blog where you review other products in the industry or in your topic. You can do a review where you have a video review or a podcast review, or you just take snapshots of the product and you write about it, and you link to that product or the merchant with the affiliate links. That's one way to monetize your blog.

You have what they call the embed text links, and if your visitor clicks on that text link, for some of the key words on your pages, they might be sent to another web site and you'll get paid to that click. So, that's one way.

Basically, any way that you can think of monetizing a site, not just a traditional web site, just any site, is the same way as you can monetize your blog. So, there's probably one or two distinct ways that you would monetize a blog that any traditional site may be able to. But more than that, it is pretty much the same strategy. Just think of a box and you can definitely monetize your blog that way.

Heather: Earlier on we had talked about using your blog to brand your business and, of course, if that is one of your main targets, then, that's a great way to go. So, you mentioned, "Why I'm all over my space?" Same reason that I'm branding myself. [laughs]. So, that everybody knows that Heather and they'll say, "I know who she is."

Sherman: Heather is everywhere. Everybody's page I go to, she is there.

Heather: I have all tough friends.

Sherman: Exactly. Exactly.

Heather: There's another mind set for blogging, which is the blogging to the bank type of model, where you throw up 20 different blogs and, basically, use the same article. Throw it in some kind of article content converter and put up these similar, but different articles all over the place that aren't necessarily really good content, but the idea is just to get traffic to your blog that you are going to monetize. What do you think is the best way to go for someone who just wants to sell affiliate products or just make money off of AdSense?

Sherman: I think it's possible. It's definitely viable and available. With AdSense and affiliate marketing, that's great. Make it look professional, though. I'm thinking you can definitely make your site... Like I'm about to a makeover on my hair stylist's husband's website. I call him the "Creative Romance Specialist." I'm actually having a video conference on it in a couple of days, but I'm going to make over his site. It's about in-home honeymoons, and such like that.

But I could make that into an AdSense blog if I want. I could have content there and articles about how to romance your spouse and stuff like that. I would have ads embedded into the article pose or at the bottom or the sidebars. But make it good, make it pretty, make it look attractive, that somebody can come to and go, "Wow! This is a good looking site!," "a good looking blog!" or whatever, and make them want to stay, be it using media, like video and audio, or whatever the case may be.

I have a test blog at dogs2luv.com. It's a test blog for whatever I want to test, and I have a category there for videos. My assistant picked the top twenty cutest, funniest dog videos from YouTube and posted it there. That's just one way you can do it, just have some multimedia come in to the blog and you can have a YouTube video there with maybe some AdSense ads around the video. If it's affiliate marketing, there's no reason not to make it a good looking blog, professionally written, with professional looking screen shots, or video previews, and stuff like that.

Put yourself in the shoes of a visitor. Would you want to go to a site that is butt-ugly that uses the Wordpress default theme? [laughs] Or, something customized, something that looks good? Which one would you stay at longer? So, you can do that. However, Heather, you mentioned somebody would throw up spinned articles on different blogs to drive traffic to one blog, or to one static site. You can do that. I don't recommend it.

First of all, it's trash content. Put yourself in the customers shoes. If you read that article, would you be impressed by the quality and the credibility of the writer and would you click through to go find out more? If not, then why create such a negative street cred for yourself? It doesn't cost much to have articles written, so write some unique articles for yourself, or have your assistant write those articles or get it off Elance or whatever, and use that wisely. You can use those articles on authority sites like we've been talking the entire conversation.

On Squidoo, or ezine articles or wherever, MySpace, and have people link back, or come to your blog that you are trying to make money with. Because you've put some good stuff out there that people are curious to find out more about what you are offering so that you can encourage clicks, you can encourage click to your AdSense ads, to your products you are reviewing, so you can make money from it.

I've realized that street cred is all you have. Your integrity and your influences are so important that if you build yourself a good reputation out there, people will trust what you say. Sometimes, almost to a fault, where they don't even think for themselves anymore. It's kind of like, "Whatever Truman says is good, is good."

Heather: [laughter]

Sherman: It's crazy, but it happens. It happened to me recently where I promoted something and I had to retract my promotion...

Heather: Yeah, I saw that. [Laughs]

Sherman: I had to apologize to my audience, and let them know that it was something that I goofed on, and I asked for forgiveness... you wouldn't believe, Heather, the amount of... 99 percent of the emails came back saying, "Sherman, your integrity is still intact with us. We trust to. You are one of the few emails that when it gets sent to us, we open it right away, and thank you so much for even just sending the second email to retract it and apologize".

And I realized at the time that, man, it is so important to, number one, build a good rep. Number two, preserve your street cred. Number three, don't take your influence lightly because businesses and lives will be positively or negatively affected because of your influence on the net.

So I'm going to take who I promote and what I promote very seriously now, not that I haven't, but being very, very cautious, and to promote offerings that are very, very tightly related to my topic. So instead of being a jack of all trades, just be really specialized that way. If I have interests in different things like podcasting, then maybe I'll set up an entire new audience and new product around that, and then that audience there will want to know more about podcasting-related stuff instead of about the latest traffic scheme. You know what I'm saying?

Heather: Right.

Sherman: It's recently just been hammered into me that I just have to treat my posse [laughter] with great care and concern. Everybody has different values, so this is just me. If I would honestly send this out to my family members and have them buy it, then it's a good thing. I can send it to my list and be proud of it, because at the end of the day, that's all I have. My integrity, my name, my street cred, and that's what I have to live with.

Heather: Yeah.

Sherman: So to answer your question, approach your AdSense or your affiliate marketing with also the same care. If you don't honestly care, hire somebody who cares. Hire a virtual assistant to be your ghost writer, and pretend to be you. Tell them that you want something that's good looking, something that's professional, with integrity, and you can make money with that. You don't have to do it yourself.

Heather: So the professional look, the templates, the themes, obviously that affects the visitor to your blog. But do the search engines care?

Sherman: It depends if the theme is coded with good code. The engines, that's just creative. The engines will just grab the feed, the XML code. The front-end theme is really the usability... it's how you attract a visitor, and keep a visitor. It's just basic usability issues. You know, navigation, you know, the proper naming of pages, that kind of stuff. If it's looking like just a busy site... if you naturally kind of leave sites like that feeling confused, then don't create those kinds of sites for your visitors.

Keep it clean. Less is more. Use white space, and use that well. That kind of thing. The theme that I've been using for the longest time, since 2004, is the semi-logic pro theme, and you can find it at Wordpresspro.com. It's the one I've been using for all my personal and professional since the beginning of when I blogged with Wordpress. It's SEO-friendly, it has about 80+ plugins that come with it, and they're all... Dennis, who's the developer, has either combined it if it works well, or if it doesn't work as well, he'll fork it so it works well with the theme coming out of the box.

You can add AdSense easily, you can add podcasts and videocasts really easily, it's search engine friendly, you can create newsletters that tie into AWebber in a cinch. You can customize the look of it so well, you can have a left column, center body, and right column, or two left columns and a body, or two right columns and a body, different height, different width, different sized fonts... it's just incredible.

So that's the one I've been using, and recommend to all my members to use. I actually have videos that showcase how to use it well. It has helped me so much, save time, save money, save my sanity, you know, I use it for all my client campaigns, that kind of thing. That's the one I use, but you can use anything. You can just do a search for "Wordpress themes," and you'll find more than enough to use out there.

Heather: When it comes to choosing a domain name and configuring your blog around that domain name, most of the examples you've been using are something like yourdomain.com/blog or /podcast. How does that compare to using a sub domain like blog.yourdomain.com, podcast.yourdomain.com or just having the blog as your main site. So yourdoman.com, bang, you're already on the blog.

Sherman: Correct. I have used all of the above. If I start a site with, previously as I started a site statically, statically still on pages, I would of course put it in '/blog'. I have two value sub domains so podcasting.Wordpresstutorial.com or videocastingdownloadpresstutorial.com look wealthy in the aggregate, very good rankings also.

My favorite one though is the entire thing is a blog. So you would have, like my test blog dotfillout.com, I had a whole list of blogs that I have created that the entire thing is powered by my blog, by Wordpress. So they all work well.

I personally believe that is a blog can attract visitors and it can attract search engines very well in a sub domain or sub directory, then it'll do very well for the entire site also and so I typically do that as I can.

I actually have stopped using the Dreamweaver application software to create sites. I use it maybe 95 percent of time. I am sorry, I use it maybe five percent of time because 95 percent of time I would use Wordpress to power the entire blog and part of this is freedom too because if I am in Bahamas with my family and joined cocktails and I decide to log in to a cafe because I had a new idea that I want to share. I can just log into my blog, without my laptop, without my Dreamweaver and just publish and go back to my cocktail, that kind of thing.

A lot of freedom with it, lot of fun, lot of good results on my site of Wordpresstutorials.com there I explain on three separate pages why if you're not blogging yet, click here, and explain some wider blogs. If you're not using a Wordpress yet then click here, why to use Wordpress.

So I give points about why, why the blog, why to use Wordpress, that kind of thing and hopefully, hope that that makes sense and I am not sure to answer to question about which one is maybe which one's the engine that's perfect for, but I think they all work and they all work well.

Heather: OK. So none of the three will give you preferential ranking in the search engines either for the blog pages, self or free your site in general?

Sherman: I don't know. I mean you can argue that one...

Heather: I guess it will take a lot of testing.

Sherman: Yeah, I've seen it work well for everything. I just know that where the blogs work and Wordpress works for a while, I also do know that when I deploy a campaign, but what happens on the blog, only just 20 percent of the time, especially ongoing publishing stuff but a lot of the time is done outside the blog.

Article marketing, PR marketing, social media marketing, blog marketing, podcast marketing, video marketing, that kind of stuff and I mean if somebody has to start with anything, I start with article marketing and because that gives you hundreds of backlinks in a short period of time and don't stop, just keep on going.

Go with article marketing and then branch out, go into social media marketing, create pages in some of these authority sites that builds your credibility, builds your platform, linking back to the blog and then PR. You have some news to talk about then submit to some of the news sites, whether it's prweb or whatever else. Blog marketing of course is whatever you publish on your blog, that kind of thing.

You might want to have a short podcast and then you publish your podcast reconciling back to you and in video, put a video, Google video, put on YouTube, MakeItFun, make people laugh and make people cry, you know make it viral as you can but we got to make it, just make it, just put it up here.

I mean people and some were my friends, you really get a lot of good traffic from Google Video and like yeah, I got some traffic but I got lot of that, out of that I got speaking with Ken McCarthy, I got good connections from being at the event, Heather, you know being on MySpace you get ten booking engagement for different interviews.

So you still bring good results depending on what your biz model is but you will get the result if you work on it systematically and logically and just kind of build your video hub around you and still work wonders.

It's not rocket science, there's little bit of art to it but it's just a step-by-step approach. I would build a blog, I create content, I make it look professional, make it look credible then I go to town on my circle of stuff around the blog that's outside the blog and that's where you feel a lot of good results for your site or your blogs, that's when you focus on, most of your efforts on the external stuff, outside.

Heather: OK. So let's open up the floor and press some questions. If anyone has a question for Sherman about blogging, podcasting, SEO, using blogs, just press 5* on your telephone keypad, 5* so I can see your hand on the interface and bring you into the conversation and while they're doing that Sherman, I had noticed that on the SEO Elite Forum, you had posted a little bit about what you do with videos and specifically how you can figure them. Can you give us a little bit about what you do, what kind of videos you use and how they should be presented?

Sherman: What kind of videos I use, meaning like what style of videos or...?

Heather: Yeah, you tend to use the screen capture videos.

Sherman: Correct, yeah, I call it screencasting and those are the kind of videos that I specialize in, being the tutorial guy that I am and it's really easy to use Camtasia to record the videos, whether you want to add any intro slide, outro slides or intro music background, outro music. But you would create it, package it and then I would publish it to my blog or whatever, I would also publish it to Google video and also YouTube. I haven't done YouTube as much as I should but in other places I should have been doing more.

Heather: Do you use Flash or what kind of format with the final video output be?

Sherman: If I am going to post it to my blog it would be Flash video in the.slv format and I would connect it. I had a plug-in that makes it really easy for me to add video to my Wordpress blog and you can do a Google search for "wt-slv" and you'll find, I think it's [inaudible] that is the developer that plug-in. You connect it to your blog and it makes it really easy for you to video cast it.

If I am going to post it to Google Video, what was the format do you wanted? I know they take.avi but there are several formats that Google Video takes and I can't remember, out of my head right now but I would basically create my video in that. Everything I create is, has an.avi native format and I've used Camtasia. So from there if I need to convert to a different format then I'll just convert it to that appropriate format for that video directory.

YouTube has its own formats that they want, stuff like that. I know me being connected to StomperNet, now they want me to send them my videos in movie, a QuickTime movie or.mov, but also that kind of format that I would publish my videos in. That sort of answer your question?

Heather: Yeah, and is there a certain display size that we should use to make it stream faster and better or any old video size will do?

Sherman: If you want it within the boundaries of your blog then I would recommend a 320 x 240. There's really no reason to go bigger because everybody can really see what's happening at 320 x 240. In my backstage videos I use 640 x 40. I make it bigger and you can, yes, I would generally lead to a 320 x 240 for your blogs. If you go bigger, the max you probably want to go is 450-500 pixels wide, because it will blowout the layout of your blog, if you know what I mean?

Heather: Right.

Sherman: It will push things out, and so you don't want to do that. The other place is, the audience here wants to know where some of the places you can host your video for free. You can look up ourmedia.org. It's a grassroots media platform. They say it's going to be forever free.

So, you can actually host your video there. You take the URL--the video--you would maybe want to take a screen capture of your video, put it on your blog just like you would insert an image, hyperlink that image with that URL to the video.

So, one way you could do it is stream it right from your blog, or if somebody clicks on the image it will pop-up with this video that's hosted at Ourmedia and you actually don't have to worry about bandwidth on your host, or hosting video. You can piggyback on Ourmedia, OK?

Heather: Cool.

Sherman: So that's one cool little resource trick, or tip. So yeah, a different way to do it. There are people that really enjoy adding a picture into the blog post, and linking it to the video. Because when you do a feed--when somebody subscribes to your feed, they don't see your video that you embed into your post, but they will see a picture.

So if you have for example, if you use FeedBurner for your feed, and somebody subscribes to your feed from their favorite blog reader at bloglines.com, then they will see your post, your text, and maybe they'll see the image, which is the screen capture of your video. If they click on it--it'll pop-up with that video that's hosted at Ourmedia.

So instead of having a blank space there, you actually have a screen capture of your video, which is a pretty good way to go, too.

Heather: OK. So, we've got someone from area code "562."

Arthur: Hi, this is Arthur from California--Orange County.

Heather: Hi, Arthur!

Arthur: I wanted to thank you guys for this free call, and I really appreciate it. Quick question--I was really interested when you started talking about FeedBurner, and how you can plug that into your blog. So, it basically just--I know there was an automated process of pumping out information on a blog, but I wasn't aware of FeedBurner.

I was wondering, is it possible to set up multiple blogs and use FeedBurner on them, and earn income with Google AdSense ads on them?

Sherman: Yes, I know it's possible. You can have one FeedBurner account, and you can have multiple blogs in that account. You can set up your settings, so that you can add even Amazon links, you can add AdSense Ads--basically FeedBurner tries to manage it all for you, so that you can make money with it.

It also offers you the capability of having a subscriber base to your blog, and they offer that feature. So you can set it up, take that code, put it on your blog. So that when somebody opts into your blog via opt-in, whenever you post something new to your blog, FeedBurner will email them saying, "There's a new post at this blog. Click here." It will have an excerpt of your blog post.

So, it's really good for notifying your blog readers of something new via email. So, that's just one additional feature that FeedBurner offers. But yeah, you can definitely do that, if you add AdSense, and they have Amazon and different things like that, that your readers will see in their favorite blog reader, if you use FeedBurner as your feed-management service.

Arthur: I have a question.

Sherman: Yeah.

Arthur: If I use FeedBurner, the chances of my site getting indexed higher for viewers to find are slim to none, correct? Since there's so many people probably using FeedBurner and doing the same thing.

Sherman: I don't think -- then again, I can't be sure -- but I personally don't think using FeedBurner will or will not detract from your rankings. Your rankings come a different way. They're just a feed management tool.

It's kind of like your feed hosting company. Just because you host from one company to the next doesn't mean that your rankings go up or down. Then again, it can be argued, but I'm just giving an example. I don't think that it's going to really dramatically affect your rankings by just the fact that you're using FeedBurner. Does that make sense, Arthur?

Arthur: Yes.

Sherman: Yeah, so it just manages your stuff so you can be confident in using them.

Arthur: Thank you very much for answering my question.

Sherman: Hey, you're welcome, Arthur. Thanks for being a caller.

Heather: Thanks, Arthur.

Arthur: Thank you.

Heather: Area code 818.

Sherman: 818, how are you doing?

Jim: Yes, this is Jim Krisic from California, Los Angeles.

Sherman: Hey, Jim.

Heather: Hi, Jim.

Jim: I've got a question for you. How are forums different than blogs and when do you use one versus the other?

Sherman: Forums are you talking about?

Jim: Yeah. I'm kind of new to all this and I've been familiar before, but.

Sherman: Yeah, yeah. Well I'll tell you the example. I use a forum backstage at Wordpresstutorials.com. I use Wordpress actually as the platform for publishing all my backstage videos too. But if you have a site that, if you're comparing using a forum and a blog and your forum blog is totally open to the public, you're not behind any password protection, or whatever the case may be.

I would first lean towards using a blog if you want control. If you want to look like you've got it going on, when maybe you don't at the beginning. Because if you have a forum and nobody posts in it, it looks like a ghost town. There's nothing going on. But with a blog, you can post a lot of content and it still looks like you're active even if nobody comments on the blog. But a forum is something that, if you start, you know that you're in a hot topic. You know that people can join for free and start just going to town and writing about anything and everything. Of course you've got to have good forum rules, but it gives you less control. Unless you get some seriously good moderators and good forum rules.

Jim: OK.

Sherman: So that's just my take on it. But the blogs give you control. It gives you moderation rights so you can see whether you want to publish a comment or not.

Jim: Right.

Sherman: You know, that kind of thing. So hopefully that answers your question.

Jim: When you're doing the moderating, does it become overwhelming? Do you always have it to where all postings are moderated?

Sherman: Yeah, I moderate all my posts and even at Wordpresstutorials.com blog, my site ranks very well on the search engine for Wordpress tutorials. It's still not something that is so overwhelming I can't handle it myself. I don't have a comment every day being posted on my blog. But I do moderate all of it because one, I will not chance or risk pornography or swear words on it or whatever the case may be. I don't want anybody to see it. Number two, I don't want some whacko going to town and spam commenting it, where it links to all sorts of different type of sites.

Jim: They shut you down, right?

Sherman: What's that?

Jim: If they do it inappropriately it could be something that might shut you down as well.

Sherman: Shut you down by who?

Jim: Well not if you're hosted on yourself, right.

Sherman: Yeah, if you have your own host they're not going to care. But yeah, so. For the control I moderate everything. I use a plug-in called akismet. And akismet helps me filter out a lot of the junk, the pornographic swear word type comments. I don't even see it. It automatically gets filtered. So I only really fuss with more the legitimate comments.

Jim: OK.

Sherman: Yeah, so. I think you'll be good. If it gets out of hand where you have so many comments to moderate and they're all legitimate comments then you can maybe hire an assistant to manage it for you or something.

Jim: Right, that's a good problem to have.

Heather: Yeah. [laughs]

Sherman: That would be a very good problem to have.

Jim: Yeah.

[laughter]

Jim: OK.

Heather: All right. Thanks.

Jim: Thanks very much.

Sherman: Thanks Jim. I appreciate your question.

Jim: Thanks. Bye, bye.

Heather: OK, area code 801. What's your name?

Barry: OK, this is Barry.

Heather: Hi Barry.

Sherman: Hi Barry.

Barry: I'm from Utah. And the question I have is I was very interested in the authority sites where you were putting in your articles. And I just wanted to get exactly what those sites were for sure.

Sherman: Oh, ezinearticles.com is one of them.

Barry: What you said was something about the wiki.com or something like that.

Sherman: Oh, yeah. When it comes to article marketing it would be ezinearticles.com or goarticles.com. There's a few of them. But, the ones that I was talking about, fwicki, those are social media, social marketing type sites. Fwicki.com and Squidoo.

Barry: And what were some of the other places I could go ahead and find some like that?

Sherman: MySpace is one of them. LinkedIn is also another authority site, but it's also for a different purpose. It's more professional connections. So, LinkedIn.com, Squidoo.com, Swicki.com, MySpace.com. Heather, can you think of any other social media ones?

Heather: No, but what about everyone's always saying digg this on Digg, or there's del.icio.us.

Sherman: Yeah, those are all kind of tagging. And I would bother digging about Digg.

Heather: Yeah.

[laughter]

Sherman: I wouldn't put too much time investing in trying to dig up what Digg is about. But, it's just a place where there's a bunch of people who feel they are authorities on any topic under the sun. And they can Digg a topic and it gets a lot of traffic and stuff like that. It's very non-Internet marketing related. It's very non-monetized. They're very excited about technology--geeking out on different things.

Heather: Stay away from the geeks. [laughs]

Sherman: Yeah, they have a lot of clout. But yeah, I wouldn't spend too much time on that. But, you know what? You could, Barry, if you do a search online, Google, for social media sites, or social networking...

Heather: Isn't there Friendster?

Sherman: Friendster is one of them. You'll start seeing a lot of them kind of ranking well. Or even in the paid ads section, the PPC section, AdWords, you'll start seeing them there. I don't use Friendster though. I think Face, Faces... Heather, am I right? Faces?

Heather: I don't know that one.

Sherman: Facebook, Facebook. Facebook.com is one of them.

Jerry: Facebook?

Sherman: Yeah, facebook.com is another one of them. 43things is one of them. So, just do a Google search and you'll find some of these sites.

Now, I'm a little cautious about sharing some of these because you'll have the group of people who will just go crazy on some of these places and publish really garbage, junk stuff. And, before you know it, some of these social media sites will do a no-follow tag on the links back to you. So those incoming links don't factor as well.

However, it will still draw real visitor traffic. Because the search engines don't click and buy your stuff; it's the real visitors.

So, if you're going to do anything do it that you can be proud of it so that visitors can be proud of it and be really excited about your stuff. And then come over to your blog or your site and actually take action and you can convert them, whether there's an opt-in, or click on an AdSense ad, or buy something. But do it for legitimate. I mean, do it for real. And then you'll have a business that will be evergreen, and have longevity, and stand the test of time.

Jerry: OK. Thank you very much.

Heather: Thanks.

Sherman: Thanks, Jerry. I appreciate your question.

Heather: How's your time, Sherman? Do you have time for a couple more?

Sherman: Yeah, I've got time. Go ahead.

Heather: Area code 352. What's your name?

Mike: Yeah. Hi, this is Mike. I'm from Florida.

Sherman: Hey, Mike.

Heather: Hi, Mike.

Mike: Sherman and Heather, I think you did a great job, thank you for that.

Sherman: Heather's been a wonderful host.

Mike: I know she is.. the question is, I'm creating a lot of VRE sites. And I have...

Sherman: Meaning Virtual Reality?

Mike: Yes, [virtual reality using hyper theory]. Can I add a blog into my main site on those areas and if I do as opposed to, how do you keep up with that many? You know what I mean?

Sherman: Exactly. That would be just categorized as cruel and unusual punishment. I don't manage a whole lot of blogs and if I do, actually some of them get...they don't get a whole lot of TLC.

Mike: Is it worth my while to do that? Because it takes a lot of time to keep up with.

Sherman: Well, I don't know much about hyper theory but I can't tell intelligently what the sites look like. Yes, I would recommend a blog on maybe some of the main ones for various reasons why blogging works, you know, stuff like that. But I wouldn't try to manage a whole host of blogs. If you can put them within one niche topic, then I would have a blog or two that covers the entire niche.

For example, if you have a dog topic, I would have one blog that covers dog books, dog ebooks, dog videos, dog training tools, dog whatever, dog posters, because they are also related. I wouldn't try to have one blog for each of them. Because I would rather watch paint dry than have to manage all of it.

It's cruel and unusual punishment and rightly so because I know my podcasting.wordpresstutorials.com and my videocasting.wordpresstutorials.com blog is a ghost town. I didn't manage for a long time. It still gets me rankings so I don't delete the blogs. But now I put all my podcasting videos on my main wordpresstutorials.com blog. It's easier to manage and I leave it that way. Earlier when I thought, "Oh I need separate content."

So just do it in one place. Number one, it's a good idea to blog. Number two, do it on a couple and see how you do with it. You know what I mean? If you get great returns out of it, your incoming revenue is going through the roof, then set up some more blogs and hire a VA to help you manage it. But if you have a blog and you haven't posted since 2002, then that's not a good thing. Because then it becomes like a static site.

Mike: You have any comments on blogging versus forum?

Sherman: Sorry? Repeat that?

Heather: Blogging versus forum.

Sherman: Oh, I just answered that, earlier with that question. Jim O'Bailey asked that question. I have never deployed a forum for search engine rankings. I have a forum backstage because of my community. So I know for a fact that it serves me well.

I don't know what forums look like for search engine ranking or it's a good platform for it, but blogging would be my first choice, for content management, because of control, and publishing audio and video is really easy. And you can get dialogue and feedback and can moderate it in a blog, versus forum where any Tom, Dick or Harry or Jane Mary can create a new topic, a new thing. Before you know it, the entire forum has gotten out of hand. It's so disorganized, unless you have some good moderators and stuff like that. Generally I'm towards blog.

Mike: OK, thank you very much.

Heather: All right. Thanks. So area code 803.

Arch: Hi.

Heather: Hi. What's your name?

Arch: My name is Arch.

Heather: Hi, Arch.

Arch: Thanking you for this program. I was distracted when Heather asked the question on having a blog on a subdomain. Would the blog be useful, or findable, on a search engine on the subdomain?

Sherman: Yes. Yes, it will be.

Arch: Yes, it will. OK.

Sherman: Yeah. With a subdomain or the main URL. Yeah.

Arch: Go ahead again?

Sherman: Sorry. Whether it's a subdomain or a subdirectory, it'll work well, yeah.

Arch: I see. OK. Second question: a couple of people mentioned multiple blogs. And of course you said that was cruel and unusual punishment, and I think I'd have to agree with you.

Sherman: [laughs]

Arch: [laughs] However, don't multiple blogs lose their search engine value, or rank value, when you use them to link to static sites?

Sherman: Lose its value? Well, are you talking bleeding PageRank..?

Arch: Let me rephrase... Multiple blogs from a similar IP.

Sherman: Oh, I see. First of all, I don't recommend, if you're going to interlink your sites and blogs, it might be wise to separate them out in different IPs, just in case you get all of it knocked out in one fell swoop by Big Brother. So yeah, put it on different IPs.

And instead of managing different blogs, piggyback on the authority sites like we talked about this call, because that would help you start off on a site that is already highly trafficked by visitors in the engines to bleed PageRank and links and visitors over to your main target sites or blogs. So, as far as on separate IPs, I agree with you: put it on separate IPs.

And Heather, you know what? One thing I just remembered, with this question about subdomains and subdirectories, I have a good friend in the SEO business that tested this a while ago--he tested it on static pages--that his subdomain pages adopted the PageRank minus one of the main site. So if he had a PR6 on a main site, his subdomain.domain.com would be a PR5 in short order, versus whatever else subdirectory.

So for anybody else on the call, there's something that just came to mind is, a friend of mine had tested it a while ago, and it did adopt the PageRank well and it did adopt it pretty quickly, I think. I don't play with a lot of subdomains, except for the two blogs that I don't manage now, but I use, typically, subdirectories. So hopefully, that helps the callers, the listeners on this call, with that.

Arch: Thank you very much.

Sherman: Oh, you're welcome.

Heather: Thanks. So if the subdomain is adopting PageRank minus one, wouldn't the subdirectory have the same PageRank as the original site?

Sherman: I was about to ask you that question, Heather. [laughs]

Heather: [laughs] So you're probably better off not using the subdomains, because you lose a PageRank automatically. [laughs]

Sherman: [laughs] Well, I don't know. I know that, I think my WordpressTutorials.com site is a PR6 and I think my blog is a PR5.

Heather: OK.

Sherman: The way I set it up is kind of interesting, because I actually uploaded my Wordpress blog into the root folder where my main pages are, so really, my blog URL is WordpressTutorials.com/index.php. But my main site is WordpressTutorials.com/index.shtml. But I did a redirect on the server, where it was WordpressTutorials.com/blog; it would route to index.php.

Heather: OK.

Sherman: I don't know whether that makes any difference, but it's about PR5, PR6, around there.

Heather: Not bad, either way.

Sherman: Yeah, not bad.

Heather: OK. So one final question. We're going to take area code 714. Who do we have?

John: Hi, this is John.

Heather: Hi, John.

Sherman: Hey, John.

John: I'm in Orange County, California. And thanks, Sherman and Heather, for putting this together.

Sherman: You're welcome.

John: It's been a lot of your time here. I have a quick question, and I don't know if you can answer it, though. On Wordpress, I'm running on your blogs, but I'm running my website off of.NET and Microsoft SQL Server. Will Wordpress work on that platform?

Sherman: I've had difficulties in the past. And I actually stay away, now, from any clients that host on a Windows platform, for hosting.

John: OK, because it was made for UNIX.

Sherman: Yeah.

John: OK.

Sherman: I think they can sort of make it work, but like the interface is cruel and unusual punishment.

Heather: Sherman doesn't like punishment. [laughs]

Sherman: Yeah, that self-torture thing is not high on my list. So, I tend to either have the client set up a host on a Linux platform host and we'll have the blog there externally, or they want to maybe transfer their current pages to a Linux page, so I can make it work. Or that client doesn't become a client.

[laughter]

John: Right. Can you recommend any other blog source code that would run on Windows?

Sherman: I don't know. Actually, if you use Blogger and you FTP the files up to your host, it might work. They reside as HTML files. So, I don't know if your Windows will only take ASP or HTML. But, Moveable Type might be another one to look at because Moveable Type I think uses HTML files too.

John: OK.

Sherman: So consider that one.

John: OK, I appreciate it. Thank you.

Sherman: You're welcome.

Heather: All right, thanks. So, Sherman, can we just kind of summarize what you've said? And give anyone some tips that you can leave them with if they're just starting with the first blog. How should they go about doing it the most effectively?

Sherman: Wow. OK. First of all, if you're new to blogging, do not be afraid.

[laughter]

Heather: They won't bite.

Sherman: Yeah. Well, I can't say you won't screw it up. Well, I'll put it this way. If you're starting out, if you go to Wordpresstutorials.com, you'll see in the footer links--you'll see a link that says "contribution." And if you click on that, you'll be presented with 15 free videos that belong to my volume 101 of my videos that show you all the way from what is a blog for business owners, all the way to installing your blog on your host that uses cPanel. OK?

Now, this will guide you through the steps of getting your blog to install. And you can then pat yourself on your back, and jump up and down because you've installed your first blog. And, it really is time for celebration. So, do that.

And then if you choose to, my videos are there to help you out through the other steps and the other processes. But if not, you can always Google for help or go to Wordpress.org and seek out the forums, which is another lesson on cruel and unusual punishment. [laughs]

And you can Google for Wordpress themes and find a theme that you like. You can then download it, unzip it, upload it to the appropriate folder on your host, activate the theme, and you'll be presented with an entirely new look for your blog.

And then do a little bit of searching around for what plugins are, and what kind of plugins you can use to kind of power your blog to be more powerful. And there are tons of plugins out there. There are plugins to optimize your blog so that your title of your post has more prominence than the name of your blog in the title tag. Podcasting plugins and videocasting plugins. It's all available out there. A lot of it is free.

If you want to use the theme I use at Wordpressprotheme.com. That one is a paid theme. I think it's about, I can't remember how much it is, $297 or something like that, but it's well worth the money. Save you a lot of time, money, and sanity.

But, basically, the bottom line is blogging will help you not only from a search engine traffic standpoint, which is good. It will get you indexed fast. It will get you good rankings if you do it right, but it will help you build your credibility. It will help you build your platform--your subject matter expertise. It will help you build your relationship with your audience through feedback and dialogue and comments.

It will be fun. And it's really easy to publish. And it will make you look sexy and help you lose weight by blogging too.

Heather: [laughter]

Sherman: If you blog too long, you might get a trucker's butt, so you might want to get up and exercise some.

[laughter]

Sherman: But, it's good for you. [laughs] So, that's hopefully what I can leave you with.

Heather: Yeah, that's perfect. Thanks a lot Sherman for being here and sharing with us all your expertise on blogging and podcasting. And thanks for naming Elite Sessions. [laughs]

Sherman: You're welcome Heather. You've been such a gracious host, great questions, and I thank you for your time.

Announcer: You've been tuned into Sherman on ShermanLive.com.