You found your niche and words are beginning to coagulate into sentences and, hopefully, sentences into paragraphs. But crossing your fingers and wishing really, really, really hard won't bring people to your blog. You have to be willing to put forth an extra effort to cultivate a following. Doing otherwise is like fishing without bait or being the world's second fastest man—neither guarantee that anyone will take notice.

In this two-part installment, I provide a nightcap to earlier discussion on finding and maintaining blog content; the second confronts the uphill battle of summoning an audience.

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In my last blog, I proposed a manifesto. They were a set of values that I felt every writer should conscientiously exercise, as to produce effective content. But what good is content without direction? In this blog, I slip on my kids' gloves and guide you to authority-status of a niche.

In hindsight, I suppose I went about this series all wrong. To the neophyte blogger, I apologize; I took you under my direction and just sort of dropped you in the middle of a forest without your compass.

So to gain some grounding, we must first define who you are writing for and, more importantly, what you are writing.

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There's this scene from a movie, and I can't bring myself to remember the title, but the plot had reached its climax and one of the actors turns to the other and begins to mouth something snarky, and almost immediately, that other actor interjects, "You better choose those next words carefully," he says, "because they just might be your last."

I'm pretty sure the scene fleshes out with the wrong words being said and a gunshot or two. The issue I'm stressing is that exact words—words that precisely relate a message, no filler, no fluff—separate books that are read from books that go unread; blogs that succeed from blogs that decay to inactivity. The right words are paramount to developing a readership and effective SEO.

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I usually enjoy the SEOptimize blog a great deal, but I was sifting through my RSS reader today and noticed a post from Patrick Altoft that I couldn’t agree with less, ‘Link Exchange in 2008'.

I am not sure if I disagree with the blog as much as I disagree with what was left out of the blog.

I agree that exchanging links with similar sites is a great way to kick off the link building process for a new site, but I think if you do so in the traditional reciprocal fashion your labor will be fruitless.

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Anyone can blog—and they do. Too many people share an undeserved confidence in their opinions and expertise; that it's their voice that carries the most weight and is justified in its gusto. As a result, the blogosphere has become saturated to a discouraging level for many anxious and baby-faced newcomers.

To prove my point—that anyone and everyone blogs—I conducted a simple test. It was to see how fast I could register an account with WordPress and make my first post—a base set of goals, but by definition, a blog...

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Google won't index your website. It's nothing personal. Shame, really, you invested a lot of time and creativity putting that thing together. Does this sound familiar? Sitting around and feeling sorry for yourself, not doing anything about it. It's tee-ball all over again.

Well cheer up, mopey. Let's do something about it.

First, a little research. Trudge on over to Google so we can find out just how big it thinks you are, using the site: query. This is going to return every page of yours that Googlebot has indexed.

Eg. site:www.thatagency.com

We came out looking pretty good, how about you?

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Much like the late Rodney Dangerfield, internal links get no respect.

Every time I hear an "expert SEO" rail on about the importance of inbound links above all else, I cringe. Not because it is an inherently wrong viewpoint, but because it takes the complexity of search engine optimization and boils it down to one factor. The success of Google has been hinged on its ability or failure to lower the strength of a single factor from being too influential, and although IBLs are still the single most important factor in most search algorithms, to make a link building plan for your website and not evaluate your internal linking structure is a mistake.

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A guaranteed method to boosting your visibility on the web is by link building. When I say link building, I'm talking about quality link building. Anyone can chuck a handful of links at sites like del.icio.us or Yahoo Answers or Wikipedia, but those are typically sources of constant updating and offer only temporary traffic. To stand against time, you'll need to invest time, and as the saying goes, "Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight."

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Google is a big deal. It's seemingly the only search engine out there. They offer a bevy of services that you will probably never use. It's even a verb. I'm going to THAT Agency *insert noun here* when I get home. See. As debonair as the name may be, it just doesn’t have the same flow. That is why I believe it's an absolute travesty that people don't use it the way it wants to be used. That came out a little dirty. I'll try it again. Let's make Google work for you! Cheesy, but PG.

Let's dive right in.

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eMarketer, in a study released last month, estimated that 18.5 million Americans have downloaded a podcast at least once. Furthermore, in 2007, there was an active podcast audience (those who downloaded an average of one or more a week) of 6.5 million Americans. These numbers answer the tired, lingering question, "is anyone listening?" and raises a new one, "is anyone listening to you?""

I have to admit, I, too, was skeptical at first. The years I spent in radio broadcasting turned me callous to a format that can become so easily saturated with rehashed content and insipid advertising. But unlike radio, whose goal is to reach the broadest of demographics, successful podcasts target specific topics or genres, making it easier for a person to listen to exactly what they want, instead of having to sift through the slush.

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