I’m embarking on a new blog series here that will help all sorts of bloggers engage with the ever-popular Google Webmaster Tools, a powerful and absolutely critical web service that you need for your blogging efforts.

From managing your blog to understanding search data to even telling Google how to “see” your blog – we’ll walk through it all.

As usual, here’s a working Table of Contents that will be filled out as we walk through this series. Even if you’re a seasoned veteran I hope you can learn a thing or two from this series!

Let me know if you have any questions or want to call out anything specific that you’d like to see!

This series is a must for serious bloggers! As always, John offers superb tools!

When someone talks about achieving online authority, what do they mean? And why are so many marketers and business owners fighting to be the online authority in their industry?

Being an online authority essentially means you're not only a thought leader on a specific topic, but that you've also taken the time to translate that knowledge in a meaningful way online. And if you're a business owner, you've gone about it in such a way that search engines see it, your prospects and customers recognize it, and as a result, it helps you generate customers and revenue.

It makes sense: People do business with the people they trust. And putting yourself out there, giving your brand a personality, and taking the time to present research, updates, and opinions that help your prospects and customers is how trust is earned. People used to do it in person; they still do, but now their reach can be extended by thousands and even millions by doing it online, too.

As it turns out, one of the easiest methods of doing all this is through content creation. It's how people and search engines find you and determine your relevance; over time, the cream rises to the top. If you're trying to build your online authority -- like most smart marketers are -- these are the ways you can use content to get the job done.

Content is still king!

Blogging is a good start, but if you want to really rank high, you have to go to the next level…

Getting on the first page of Google is a daunting challenge for bloggers and webmasters. Google is a search engine behemoth that controls nearly 70 percent of all internet searches and ranking on its first page translates to better traffic and can make all your financial targets come true.

With everybody competing for the same prize, achieving first page results in Google is hard but not entirely impossible. You won’t need tons of cash, you just need a well-structured game plan and the patience to follow it even when things aren’t going your way.

Source: Improve your Google Rankings – Blueprint for Success | The Expand2Web Blog

Go to the source if you want the rest of Suzzane Edwards perspective on how to do it.

If you are into internet marketing, this is worth the read...

What are some of the things on your personal roadmap for 2012 (as far as you can tell)? What have you got planned? What are some of the crazy-awesome projects that you’re planning on starting, building, and launching? What are some of the new businesses that you’re going to begin? What things will you stop doing this coming year that you’ve done every single year so far?

One of the most powerful things that I’ve learned about sharing my goals is that I typically am more amped about completing them after I share them. I know that many people suggest that sharing ideas actually stops your progress but I haven’t found that to be true. Obviously I’ve found it to be just the opposite.

I concur wholeheartedly with John about sharing goals and how that can be a motivator!

Up first, a stellar special report for immediate free download.

Some people say Merry Christmas.

Others say Happy Hanukkah.

Still others believe the holiday season is a massive conspiracy created by corporate America to part you with your money.

Whatever your orientation though, one thing is for certain:

You love free swag.

In past years, Copyblogger Media has been a little chintzy around the holidays, in my opinion. Sure, we’ve given you our regular — albeit awesome — daily content right up until Christmas. But we’ve never prepared an actual gift for you.

And that’s wrong. Because … well … we love you guys. And that’s not just the eggnog talking.

So this year, I begged indulgence to do something special. I asked if I could give away maybe the greatest report I’ve ever written, and Sonia agreed.

It’s 55 pages long.

There’s nothing for sale at the end.

You don’t even have to give me your email address to get it.

All you have to do is click here.

This is a great gift for yourself, and the best part is....it's free!

I’m no expert when it comes to such things are marketing and branding, as typically understood in industry standards, and I’ve never held a job where the core role and responsibility were those two things exclusively so if you’re looking for a textbook overview then you’ve come to the wrong place pal!

But, I do know a thing or two when it comes to personal branding online, or the art and science of managing your online equity in a way that’s comprehensive, accurate, fair and naturally a good representation of who you are and who you want to ultimately attract.

What you can expect in this series is a look at how I think globally about my online personal brand, the tools and techniques that I use to manage and control it, how I curate positive feedback and how I dismantle the negative, and how leverage it as a tool for conversion for my business and financial bottom line.

I hope you enjoy! Here’s a loose table of contents that I’ll be following:

An excellent series!

Personal branding isn’t very different than your typical fare of company branding and branding you see for products and services.

What is “branding” you say? Well glad you asked! The AMA (American Marketing Association) defines a brand as a “name, term, sign, symbol or combination of them intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of other sellers.”

But the definition has obviously now been extended liberally into other areas and studies have shown that there’s a deep psychological and emotional component to branding as well – and those that illicit emotion are the ones that you find yourself extremely passionate about over and over and over again. This, actually, is the quality result of good branding.

How does your brand 'translate' to the online space?

f you’ve been blogging for any amount of time, you’ve heard that content is king. You’ve been told that everything else—design, SEO, in and outbound links—those things are a bonus, but the real thing you need to focus on is your content.

And it’s true, content is king, because even an SEO-optimized blog with a beautiful, user-friendly design and a parade of in and outbound links will fail without great content.

But although content is important, there’s something more—something that only you can bring to the table, something that only you have to offer that will really make your blog shine. A secret ingredient that will make your blog unforgettable.

You.

Your voice matters

’ve learned a thing or two over the past decade of blogging and the reality of being a professional blogger is not all that it sounds like or looks like.

It’s tough climb to the top and it takes a lot of time, a lot of detours, a lot of surprise challenges, and tons of disappointments. And unlike climbing a mountain there aren’t any specific or tangible “paths” to the top – you have to craft your own and follow general models and principles of business, writing, marketing, and sales.

But otherwise you’re completely on your own; sure, you may have a community of people around you but what I mean by this is that you’re the one doing the writing. Someone has to sit down every single day, draft and publish that content, engage with your readers, and make it all count.

In other words, no one will believe in your dream more than you so you’ll have to carry it through to the finish line. But for some that’s a really good thing!

Here are 5 realities that I was pondering this past week that will hopefully provide some context and insight into what you can expect if you make the jump from the 9-5:

There’s been a video that’s been passed around recently around the interwebs that shows a “lost” interview with Steve Jobs earlier in his career between the time of being dismissed from Apple and being a few years into NeXT, his literal next adventure. It’s been difficult to find because the original company behind the interview has been pulling it down left and right due to copyright infringement but if you Google hard enough you should be able to find a copy.

I suggest you do and if you can sit through the 50 minutes it’s well worth the time. In it he shares some really candid thoughts about business, entrepreneurship, product development, and leadership – it was a great display also of his style of interviewing which was very candid but often-times not as polished (at least the first shot).

There was one part that was particularly powerful for us as bloggers that I wanted to share here with you – it’s the idea of being an effective “thinker and doer.” As a digital publisher and writer you desperately need a combination of both; unfortunately most people are in short supply of one or the other.

Steve hits the nail on the head when he shares these thoughts:

My observation is that the doers are the major thinkers. The people that really create the things that change the industry are both the thinker-doer in the same person.

Leonardo was the artist but he also mixed his own paints, he also was a fairly good chemist, knew about pigments, knew about human anatomy. Combining all of those skills together, the art and the science, the thinking and the doing, resulted in the exceptional result.

And there is no difference in our industry – the people that have really made the contributions have been the thinkers and the doers.

Usually when you dig a little deeper, you find that the people that really did it were also the people that worked through the hard intellectual problems as well.

It’s both a balance and a tension – you’re already an entrepreneur by being a digital publisher (blogger) and yet at the same time we all can be paralyzed by very “uncreative” moments where we’re not completely sure what we’re doing with our blog(s) or what we’ll even write about that day!