With social media blogging, and with many forms of marketing, it's important to develop some sort of attention getting aspect of the marketing campaign so that you get people's "foot in the door". You need people to start reading your blog because of this attention getting tactic: from that point, you're awesome content and tremendous insights should do the rest in terms of keeping people there, right?

On SearchEngineLand.com, a popular SEO / Internet Marketing website, I read an article where Danny Sullivan basically (1) calls out Bill Gates for being an SEO "newbie" and (2) provides a pretty detailed "here's what you need to change on your blog" analysis / gameplan.

The Background...

Bill Gates has a blog where he shares some of his thoughts with the world. Long story short, this blog is outranked by many fake blogs (i.e. not written by Bill Gates) if you go to Google (or Bing) and type "Bill Gates Blog".

Much of the problem is caused by Bill Gates' real blog not utilizing basic SEO best practices. He hasn't taken the time to do the basics of SEO on his blog and it's hurting his search engine results.

I'm not going to spend this entire blog posts explaining why Bill Gates' SEO on his blog is wrong: that type of article is at SearchEngineLand.com. Instead, I want you to read this article and learn an important aspect of successful blogging.

One effective way to make an article go "viral", which means spreading around the internet very quickly, is to cause a bit of controversy. Bill Gates' blog lacks some of the most basic SEO principles, things that are extremely easy to fix. SearchEngineLand.com called Bill out on this fact, provided a detailed explanation of what he needs to do, and did it all in a professionally acceptable way. SearchEngineLand.com called out one of the most successful businessmen in the world and showed him a thing or two in their blog post, thus boosting their own credibility along the way.

Do you see anywhere in your industry where the big companies are making some pretty newbie mistakes? How could you constructively "show them a thing or two"?

You could also connect things that are happening outside of your industry (such as politics, etc.) to your industry / company, although this takes a bit more of a creative writing approach. That's a blog for another day ; )