{"id":4559,"date":"2008-07-14T09:30:29","date_gmt":"2008-07-14T13:30:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hellospark.ca\/en-us\/blog\/internet-marketing-toronto-post-6-blogging\/"},"modified":"2008-07-14T09:30:29","modified_gmt":"2008-07-14T13:30:29","slug":"internet-marketing-toronto-post-6-blogging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hellospark.ca\/en-us\/blog\/internet-marketing-toronto-post-6-blogging\/","title":{"rendered":"Internet Marketing Toronto &#8211; Post 6: Blogging"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong> Internet Marketing Toronto &#8211; Post 6: Blogging<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Blogging is a fantastic way to produce timely content on your website and participate in current conversations online. Confine this to a local geographic area and you&#8217;re now reinforcing your local presence to the search engines.<\/p>\n<p>The first step in this process is installing the blog software &#8211; we recommend WordPress as it&#8217;s free and powerful. You should always install your blog on your main domain in something like www.domain.com\/blog or a folder named after your most important keyword.<\/p>\n<p>Installing WordPress is beyond the scope of this post but you can great information about it on the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wordpress.org\" target=\"_blank\">WordPress<\/a> site. After installing the blog you should start investigating blogs you can participate in. Here is how you can do that:<\/p>\n<p><strong>Following Conversations In Your Target Locality<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>You need to find blogs that are publishing content preferably in your industry but not necessarily within the context of Toronto as a location or any geographic area you are targeting. There are several ways you can do this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Use <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloglines.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Bloglines <\/a>&amp; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Technorati <\/a>to query for blogs with Toronto as a term. Visit the blogs and if they are indeed publishing content about Toronto then subscribe to their feed in your Google Reader (or favorite feed-reader application).<\/li>\n<li>Use Google to find .ca blogs talking about Toronto with this query [toronto blog site:.ca]. Add another qualifying keyword to target your industry. Visit each site and if it&#8217;s appropriate subscribe to their feed<\/li>\n<li>Setup Google Alerts to send you current data about your industry with .ca and blog as part of the query. Review and subscribe to those feeds as well.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Now that you&#8217;ve identified a tremendous source of content to work with you need to start reading each of the blogs and participating through comments in a very meaningful way. Don&#8217;t spam. Don&#8217;t use a keyword as your name. Don&#8217;t respond to to more than one post on your first visit to the blog. Don&#8217;t comment on older posts unless you find it particularly insightful! Use your real name, email and targeted URL and leave well written meaningful comments.<\/p>\n<p>Do this on a regular basis\u00a0 at least once a week and watch your backlinks grow. These are good links (followed or not)!<\/p>\n<p><strong>Publishing Content On Your Website<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Now that you&#8217;ve begun participating with the other blogs &#8211; start blogging on your own site. Be free with your links and promote the other blogs your reading and commenting on. Overtime you&#8217;ll get their attention and they&#8217;ll begin reciprocating and your readership will grow as will your backlinks.<\/p>\n<p>Identify timely local news and events preferably in your industry to post about.<\/p>\n<p>All of these activities will serve to reinforce to the search engines your local presence and intent on being known for geographic terms!<\/p>\n<p><strong>Up next:<\/strong> Post #7: Forums. Find out which forums might be worth participating in within the Toronto context.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Internet Marketing Toronto &#8211; Post 6: Blogging Blogging is a fantastic way to produce timely content on your website and participate in current conversations online. Confine this to a local&hellip;","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[892],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized-en-us-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hellospark.ca\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hellospark.ca\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hellospark.ca\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hellospark.ca\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hellospark.ca\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hellospark.ca\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4559\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hellospark.ca\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hellospark.ca\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hellospark.ca\/en-us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}