Blogging for Business
Not long ago a blog was simply an online diary. Initially, people decided that blogging was describing, in excruciating detail, how their day went, what they had for dinner last night, and why they spent the whole weekend doing laundry. Since then, blogging made the transition into the business arena. Now blogs are frequently being used as business journals, tools that can help keep your customers and web site visitors up to date with what is going on with your company. A business blog is an excellent tool to toot your own horn, let the world know about your new products, and tell your target customers why they should do business with you, rather than your competitor. Don't have a blog for your business yet? No problem! Here is how you can start blogging in just five easy steps: * Set up a blog for your business. If you don't want to have to set up things on your own, visit Blogger.com. Blogger will host your blog on its server, so that you don't have to add anything to your own web site. On the other hand, if you'd like to set something up on your own, get blogging software from WordPress.org * Make your blog an extension of your business identity. The look and feel of your blog should match that of your business web site. Don't forget to include your logo! * Don't make the blog into a giant ad. Your readers will immediately recognize that ruse and stop reading the blog. Instead, post the items that are of interest to your current and potential customers. Use the blog to post tips and ideas, articles, information about new products, etc. * Strike a balance between personal and business stuff. While customers like to read the blog to learn about the person behind the business, don't use the blog as a tool to vent, complain and discuss the details of your personal life. You use the blog to converse with your customers, so the blog should be as professional as your newsletter and phone conversations with customers. It is great to post a story about how you helped a client get an important product out on time, and how proud that made you feel. It might not be appropriate to post a story about an argument you had with a video store clerk over the weekend. * Leverage your Blog. When you are in business, you realize that many customers have similar questions/concerns. Address these concerns in your blog, and when another customer has the same concern, link directly to the blog entry that answers these concerns. A blog is an excellent tool to reach potential customers, rank higher in search engines and generate more of the ever-important visitor traffic to your web site. Biana Babinsky is the online business expert who has helped many business owners attract more web site customers, bring in more online publicity and increase the bottom line. Visit http://avocadoconsulting.com/free_newsletter.html to subscribe to her newsletter full of marketing tips and ideas and join her online business coaching program at http://www.MarketingSalad.com
Related News
Fast Talk Response - - Fast Company
Fast Talk Response -Fast Company -Aug 20, 2008... in the last year to 18 mos. is because it has all the benefits of blogging (RSS,commenting,sharing,tagging,bookmarking) but none of the hassles. ... |
Lessons from the India USA Nuclear deal - indiainteracts.com
Lessons from the India USA Nuclear dealindiainteracts.com, India -Sep 6, 2008... September 6th, 2008 at 4:02 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. ... |
Getting Sucked Into Social Networking - Corsavoo.com
Getting Sucked Into Social NetworkingCorsavoo.com, France -Sep 6, 2008When you post blogs or files in your account, everyone from your network of friends will be informed of the update through RSS feeds. ... |
Google says Goodbye to RSS, Hello to Followers - Appscout
Pro-Blogger - How to have a Constant Stream of Blogging Ideas - PR CannaZine (press release)
Travel 2.0 marketing services for hotels launched - m-Travel.com
E-Mail marketing and blogging provider iContact gets $5 million in ... - InternetRetailer.com
9 Things To Think About When Planning An Executive Blog - Social Computing Magazine
Food blogging: Pumpkin baked ziti with caramelized onions and sage ... - Feministe
Tips On Blogging For Dollars - Corsavoo.com
|
|
 |
|
|
RELATED ARTICLES
RSS for Newbies; A Quick Tutorial
"RSS" stands for "Really Simple Syndication". It is a new way to distribute content. Any content: websites, blogs, forums, etc.
To explain what this means, for once let's start at the end.
Comparing Free Blogging Software
With the increased interest in Blogging (web Logging), many web hosting providers now provide an assortment of free usage, open source blogging software packages. Among the most popular of these blogging tools are B2evolution, WordPress and Nucleus. Each of these programs offer similar basic features, so the question arises as to which one is easiest to use and would be appropriate for the requirements of your particular website.
RSS Meets the Needs of Direct Marketers
Contrary to general opinion, RSS meets the needs of even the most demanding direct marketer, actually providing most of what e-mail marketing does, except for the strong push factor.
Start Blogging Now: 10 Reasons Why You Really Need a Blog for Your Business
1. It is perfect for creating a web presence for independent professionals who have something to say and who need people to get to know them and what they can do for them.
16 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog
You've got your blog set up and you've started posting pithy, useful information that your niche market would benefit from and enjoy. Days go by, you keep publishing, but no one comments and your traffic stats are barely registering. What do you do?
Why Your Blog Might Be Sabotaging Your Business
Many marketers were very excited when forum and newsletter discussion focused first on blogs (about two years ago) and then on RSS feeds (mainly within the past year). It was a brand new opportunity for marketers to use, one that promised both search engine success and a way around spam complaints. So they ran out and created a free blogger account or bought some software and began blogging and trying to set up RSS feeds.
Blogging for Dollars
Blogging for dollars might sound like the latest game show or some new drinking game, but it's the latest craze to hit the Internet. Bloggers began blogging for a number of reasons, but as the blog movement has increased in popularity, they have found ways to monetize their blogs and are seeing their commitment pay off.
Why you should be using RSS
RSS opens up a whole new channel of communication between you and the browsing public. If at the moment you do not have an RSS feed then there is a whole community of people who do not know about you. Isn't it time you started to publish an RSS feed, here are a few reasons to get started right now.
Dear Web Diary!
Blogging is hot and getting hotter, with more and more web logs (blogs) cropping up online by the day!
Details of Getting a Blog
Blogs, the abbreviation of Web Logs (online journals), are becoming more and more popular all the time. People are starting new blogs at an astounding rate so it's safe to assume that there are constantly people out there who want to know how to get a blog going. Despite personal feelings about the actual quality of the majority of blogs out there on the Internet, that's what I hope to be able to help you do with this article.
7 Questions To Ask Yourself BEFORE Staring A Business Blog
Blogging is the latest buzzword in online marketing and PR.
3 Overlooked Ways to Get Hundreds of Links and Prospects to Your Blog
Did you know that there are free ways that you can get links back to your blog overnight? That after a few days they can number in the hundreds?
No matter what you market on the internet at some point you'll face the issue of increasing the number of visitors to your site. What most people don't know is that there are literally hundreds of ways to get free traffic. Here we'll focus on three overlooked ways to get additional traffic to your site using a blog.
The third most overlooked way to bring traffic to your site with a blog is to read and comment on other blogs.
Now, maybe you've done this before but stopped, because you're
becoming concerned about being considered a link-spammer. In
that case, leave a link to your site after your comments, instead of in the comment form that hot links it.
In the near future, blogmasters will be able to use special code to prevent spam in their comments section, so this will become less of a concern.
Besides, getting clicks from people who read comments, or visits from search engine spiders through your comments, isn't necessarily your direct objective, though it's definitely a plus.
What you want to do via commenting is to enter the blog community that corresponds to your target market. Get to know who the players are and make agreements with them to cycle traffic between you.
Or lurk to find out where your target market typically hangs out when they're online ? you'd be surprised at how many inexpensive and targeted advertising sources you can find through this method.
(If you're looking to get linked, there's another way that we'll go over next.)
This tip alone has earned me a few dozen links from prominent blogs in the past four days alone.
These links are worth ten times a reciprocal link because they send targeted traffic from established sources, and come from experts with records of proven results.
You can be sure these kinds of people will check you out before they linked to you, since they may be judged by the quality of the information they share.
The second method to more blog traffic is the most confusing for newer people, and this is probably the reason its benefits remain overlooked.
In the simplest of terms, Trackback is kind of a remote commenting system that incorporates linking. It allows the reader to follow a topic around the web to see other bloggers remark on the same subject. It enables the publisher to remotely cite references to the issue on which they've written.
Once you've made yourself familiar with the blogging community you have entered, you can often pick up the pulse of conversations within your site's theme. Then, when you see issues that you want to expound on, you can send the other site a notification to let them know you cited them on your blog. That link will appear on their site, and often draws visitors to you.
Bloggers who use Trackback often enjoy greater control over
this function in their blogs than they do over linking, as they have the option to reject your reference - so there is a lesser incidence of fraudulent linking. That also gives your link a greater chance of being displayed.
So why don't more people use Trackback?
One reason is that what is arguably the most popular free blog system, Blogger, doesn't have Trackback. However, Haloscan.com can remedy this with their free service ? it's a cut and paste away.
Many new bloggers don't get what it is and how it differs from commenting. And of course, the dynamics of it are a little more complex than I've stated. But learn to use Trackback properly, and you won't need to beg for links to your site ever again.
It's harder to estimate an exact number of visitors that come as a result of trackback links. But if you posted five days out of seven, and was able to get a trackback link to your site three times a week, by the end of the year you'd have almost 150 topical links back to your site, which are more valued by search engines than a typical link trade with an unrelated site.
The most overlooked source of traffic for a blog is through article submission. To start with, turn your longer posts into articles and submitting them to ezines or directories. Look especially for directories that ask for the direct link to the article on your own site, and input the permanent link to the post on your blog.
Make sure that your Auto-Discovery tag is in place and it can mean hundreds more prospects, links and subscribers.
It's a shame this is the one of the least used traffic methods for most sites, let alone for blogs. In four days, this method generated just over 1000 visitors. 157 newsletter leads, 98 new feed subscribers, and 206 links to my site. You may not get these same results right away, but using these simple strategies can still get you more exposure than you have now.
These aren't normally the highest quality links, as they rarely make sure of anchor text. However, bloggers are citing me using Trackback, sometimes in lieu of linking to the site where they originally found the article.
To see this in action, do a search on "Can A Ping Really Help Your Blog Get Top Search Engine Rankings", the title of an article I submitted earlier this week.
That article was published within a week of this one- the results speak for themselves. Many of these sites aren't the ones where my articles are normally published.
There are, of course, plenty of other ways you can leverage the content in your blog or RSS feed to increase the traffic to your site. The methods outlined here may be a bit outside the norm, but, as you'll soon find, that's part of the reason they are so effective.
Even a 70 Something Technological Challenged Mom Can Get Started in Blogging With These 10 Tips
Blogging is all the rage. With these 10 Simple Steps even My 70 Something technological challenged Mom was able to Join the Growing number of Bloggers.
Real Estate Marketing with RSS
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an increasingly popular marketing method to syndicate real estate website content for clients and prospective clients. RSS enables distribution of website content to third-party websites and RSS news readers.
What Are RSS Feeds
RSS Feeds.
Get Website Visitors From Blogs
Blogs are becoming more and more popular.
The word "blog" is short for web log.
And blogs are a great way of getting links
in to your website.
What Consumers Need To Know About RSS Feeds
Feeds are simple, really. What's even more exciting is that they are extremely easy to use, and even better, they are completely safe from Viruses, being Spammed or receiving Junk Mail. How? Basically because there is no transfer of information to your computer.
Brief History of Blogs
So where did all these blogs come from? How did they get from an underground geek toy to a mainstream tool that has revolutionized politics, journalism, marketing and the media?
Business: Deliver Information Safely
Businesses that are not using feeds today, as part of their marketing and advertising plans, will soon do so, or should thinking of implementing them soon. Although this is a fairly new communications tool it is growing rapidly. The reason is that the information gatherer, consumers, etc., are or will be using readers to view information. The main reason is that information can be viewed with No Spam, No Junk Mail and No Viruses threats.
It Really Is Simple RSS
I have 'Googlebot' coming to my site every day since a month ago I put up my first news feed, since then I have put up yet another.
|
