Blogging

Do I Need a Blog?

October 4, 2011 By carl Leave a Comment

A blog is online journal, published frequently (often daily). Each journal entry is called a “post”, and the posts are maintained in reverse chronological order; that is, the most recent is first. The word “blog” itself is a derivative of “web log”. The blog also supports comments and feedback from it readers, enabling it to potentially be a highly interactive form of communication with a global community.

Some of the reasons for blogging include:

The blog allows you to respond dynamically to your vision. It’s easy to post and manage the contents of the blog with only a minimum of experience. No programming experience is needed. You are authoring and publishing at near-zero cost.
The blog enables you to build trust and relationships with your clients (or readers). It is a way of servant leadership. Business leaders today have learned how to use blogs to talk to their customers and to turn those conversations to serious business relationships. You can use your blog to serve your customers.
The blog establishes your authority in the area of your expertise.
Blogs, as a part of your social networking, provide a high level of search engine optimization when they are done right. There is a running joke among serious bloggers (Your competitors don’t want you to know this) that BLOG stands for Better Listings on Google. That is a true statement.

Remember that freedom of the press belongs to the person that owns one. With Facebook. Google+, or Twitter you don’t own the press. With your own blog on its own host, you own the press. The best blogging software (WordPress, with the latest version at over 32 million downloads), is free. All you need is a host and domain name, and these aren’t expensive (Carl sells them).

If you are trying to decide whether to blog or not, here are some issues you need to consider:

Do you have the time? Blogging and the related social networking are very time consuming. Bloggers often post one or more times daily in the one or more blogs they own and also post in Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and other networks. Their posting content involves time-intensive research.
Do you have a passion for your vision? If the passion is there, those that read your blog will know it – and the opposite is also true. Are you willing to make the commitment for the research, writing, support, and all the peripheral work involved to make the vision work? Do you really believe in your vision, service, or product?
Do you have the knowledge? One goal here is to establish yourself as an authority on your subject. If you find yourself weak here, it shouldn’t be too serious a concern as you start. If the passion is there, you should be able master a subject in a relatively short time – at least know considerably more than most of your clients.
Do you have the necessary awareness of the new marketing paradigm using the blogs? If you don’t have this awareness, you will turn your readers off very quickly. This isn’t like television or magazine advertising.

In the old days a typical marketing phrase for success was “location, location, location”. Today it is “blog, blog, blog”. And your audience is global. The blog has become so important that people often just set up a blog and skip installing a static web site. You really need both.

Here is the basic game for most serious people using blogs and web sites. First, make massive use of the social networks: Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace and more. Use at least some of these for quick, short, regular, and if possible daily postings. Use advertising sparingly, but tease their interests and draw them into your blog. Use quotes, inspiration, humor, and personal stories in the social networks with very short postings. In between, you are David with a slingshot aiming at their niche and need. Once in your blog, use your postings with content and stories – then call them to action. If that’s new for you, why not let Carl help you with your blog?

Filed Under: Blogging, facebook, search engine optimization tools, SEO, social networking

Three important legal considerations for bloggers

June 16, 2011 By carl Leave a Comment

Thee important legal considerations for bloggers here.

Filed Under: Blogging, Uncategorized

Developing Your Web Presence Strategy

April 18, 2011 By carl Leave a Comment

The strategy for your website is a part of your large business strategy, which, in turn, is built on a business model. Moreover, most companies realze that copying or adapting someone else’s business model is neither an easy or smart path to success. This is also true of non-profits and churches. Rather, the business should identify who they are trying to reach and see what elements they can enhance or replace with Internet technologies and improve your reach of your current audience. Also, how can you use Internet technologies to reach a larger audience?

The website is one component of that. Social networking can take you beyond that and extend the power of your website. As a general rule today, the website has both a static and dynamic component.

The static component of the website defines something about your mission, who you are, has answers to typical questions, and tells people how to contact you. The static component contains multiple pages such as Home, About, FAQs, and Contact Us.
The dynamic part tells the story of what is going on and gives movement to your website. This dynamic part is often called a blog. The search engines like life and movement, and at least in our case most of our traffic comes into the website through the blog. The pages in the blog are stored as posts.

The Econoweb sites we develop can contain both a static part and a blog. Both are content managed; that is, you can update your Econoweb site easily using a simple internal editor with password access.

Take a look, for example, at the layout of our business website page. At the top (even on this page, which is a post in the blog) are two menu bars. The top menu is for the static part of the website and the menu options access different pages. The lower menu bar is for the blog, and the options here access categories of the blog. There are actually far more categories than shown on the menu bar. If you go into any of the categories, a sidebar there will give the access to other categories. The pages in the blog component are called posts, and the blog is interactive – you can comment on any of the posts, including this one.

The Bigger Picture

Your website is actually part of a bigger picture of even your web presence. This is how you might see your web presence at this point:

You can put that website out on the web, but it is much like a theme park in the desert. Unless you have roads to it AND people know how to get there, they won’t find your site and won’t go there. You have to create this larger picture. How you define this larger picture is up to you. Let’s look at one approach.

This is the concept that I use for my own websites. The social networks are used to build the roads to the website and blog. The inbound links are indexed quickly by the search engines. For this reason, you can start early using the social networks; but you shouldn’t add pointers to your website until your website is ready. If you are building an Econoweb site, we will show you later how to build those links.

Twitter – this is a good place to start, as it is easy to use. Your object here is to put something in your tweets that can tease them into your web site – normally to specific blog posts on your website. Twitter indexes your tweet immediately; that is, anyone search on Twitter on your keyword will find your tweet immediately. Google will take a little longer to find your tweet.

Facebook – This is popular because there is such a large user base on Facebook. You can also put a pointer to your website in your profile. Be careful, as commercial pushing here is frowned on in Facebook and you can get banned doing too much of it. You can, however, set up your own business on a “fan page”. Read the rules for using this. You can also joint groups on your topic of interest or start your own group. Again, the name of the game here is to tease users into your website or blog.

Linkedin – This is a professional social networking site that draws its user base from corporate executives and other business leaders. You can put your profile here and, as in Facebook. You can also join (or create new) groups of specific interest.
There are many other players in these social networks (such as Foursquare, YouTube, and many more). What works for you depends on your goals.

Using the Search Engines

Our ministry site is more dependent on the social networks and the people we know. This business site, however, is primarily dependent on vistitors arriving from searches on the search engines. This means strategic keyword phrases that a search might use to solve their problem are used with the search engines to direct them my to resources, services, and tools. The keyword phrases become very important, as they are the link. The process of making this work is called search engine optimization, or SEO. Our website designs contain basic internal SEO enhancements; but we also teach you how to do a lot of this yourself.

Putting the Pieces Together

Sue has a store in Memphis that sells wedding gowns. She doesn’t have many repeat customers. All she needs is a good static website – no blog. It would help, however, if she could market herself as a full-service store for wedding services by providing links on her website and networking with other wedding services for her clients, such as a service to print wedding invitations and another that bakes wedding cakes.

Susan owns an organic food restaurant in North Carolina. Her business really picked up when she added a blog to her website that published recipes for many of her menu items. She also uses the blog to announce special discounts and new entrees. She’s just starting to use the social networking sites.

Take some time in planning your site to see the concept you wish to use for your web presence. Social networking is cheap in direct costs, but is very time consuming. If you plan to use those sites, start with a single site and get familiar with it. Don’t use the networks and other sites to point to your website and/or blog until these are working. Spend some time learning how they work while you build your site.

Filed Under: Blogging, econoweb, linkkedin, social media, social networking, Twitter, web design

Successful Secrets of Blogging

March 29, 2011 By carl 2 Comments

Adding a blog to a web site is almost essential for a web site today. For most of our clients, we can add a blog to your web site for almost nothing – a small installation charge is all that is necessary.

Here are some tips, however, to enable that blog to give you that major visitor traffic that you want.

Define the purpose for your blog. What do want your blog to accomplish? If you are blogging as part of an organization (business, church, nonprofit), you need to build consensus as to the purpose of the blog in your organization; but your blog writing should be personal.
Budget the time to keep the blog updated. Starting a blog and following the other tips here will give you that traffic quickly, but if you get tired and fail to keep it active, traffic will fall off just as quickly. A regular posting schedule works best.
Don’t rush your postings. You’ve just seen a great movie and you want to post on it while the media is hot about that movie. Enter it as a draft (or to your word processor). Then take a few days to look at your draft. How can you make your post unique? Is the spelling right? Grammar? Did you proofread your post? Does it encourage your visitors to interact?
Give your opinion. People read your post to get your opinion. Give it to them. Don’t be afraid of controversy. That only builds interest and invites comments, getting more interaction. What does your post say about and issue (movie, political issue, book, etc.) that others don’t?
Respond to comments. If someone is commenting and interacting with you on your blog, respond to them.
Comment in other blogs in your niche. That’s what this social networking is all about. Put links to your site and/or in the comments in other blogs if that blog’s posting relates to the subject of your blog.
Be personal. People don’t want to network with an organization, they want to network with people. Be honest, share your opinions. Don’t post as “Administrator”. Post under your name with your personal photo. If you are a blogger on a church site, you will find most GenX and Millennials have much difficulty relating to an institution. The institution of the church has failed them, and these generations also are highly relational. Use your name and not the church’s, but link them to the church web site.
Monitor your stats. What postings are getting read? Is visitor traffic going up or down? We provide all of our clients with a free traffic monitor system. See Postrank.com.
Stay legal. Don’t copy other people’s stuff. Use lots of links to other people’s stuff, but make your content with these links unique. Be particular careful on copying graphics. Many graphics are copyrighted by image companies.
Provide a full fee RSS. That means your RSS sends a full copy of your post to your blog subscribers.
Use Twitter as a gateway to post very frequent comments, and occasionally bring them into your blog from your tweets when a blog post is relevant. Use tools like htt://bit.ly to shorten your URLs and tease them in from the Twitter post. As your followers grow on Twitter, you will gain a rich understanding of the personality of each, their needs, and you can blog to your network more effectively. I promise – you will meet some very interesting people.
Write to people – don’t write to Google (banging your keyword phrases) or an organization. Your keyword phrases should flow naturally.
Don’t use a self-hosting blog such as blogspot.com or WordPress.com. With these you don’t look professional and can’t choose your theme. Also, your security is less.
Get a professional theme for your blog. This will cost you some money in all probability; but looking professional makes all the difference in your visitor traffic.
Write like your talk. Use your personal vocabulary but be nice, thank people who help you.This adds personality to your blog.
Watch your post headlines. Make the headline catchy. Be sure your keyword phrases are there. Tease the reader with the headline.
As others link to you, compliment them by linking to them.
Don’t blog for money. Remember this is social networking, not selling. An occasional plug for you new book is fine, but lay off the sales stuff or people will leave your blog. If you are a good restaurant, post your recipes. If you are a publisher, tell how to write a good book and get it published.
Use lists, bullets, and subheads in your posts. This will give better search engine optimization.
Keep your post on-brand. What is the purpose of your blog? Stay on that track.
Use an photo in your comments that shows your face or personality. I prefer a facial photograph – not a distance shot or clipart.
Drive content from passion. See: http://freelancefolder.com/the-difference-between-fluff-and-interesting-content/.
If your post is out to tear something down (political, religious, educationally, health), build a vision of what the vision should be and how to get there. Give the reader vision, hope, and strategy.

What other ideas can you add?

Filed Under: Blogging

Using Blogs to Increase Your Web Traffic

March 24, 2011 By carl 9 Comments

Adding a good blog to your web site, in many cases, can dramatically increase your web traffic. We’ve seen it work. Let’s look at the strategy here and related costs.

First – the direct costs are almost zero. You can use an open source and free blog such as WordPress for many hosts. It’s also easy to install and use. Support is provided through a forum. You’ll have lots of people trying to spam your blog with unrelated comments, but you can add the free Karma 2 spam filter that takes out almost all of the spam at the host level.

As far as indirect costs – to make a blog work takes time. You’ll see from the strategy here it takes lots of time for both writing the blog and researching to write it.

This author posts in three blogs and comments in others. You may feel that what you have to say can’t have much effect in the cyberspace with over 19 million blogs out there now. Quite the opposite. Let’s take an example how it works. I got ripped off by Vonage, a VoIP company, for over $8,000 dollars when they dropped my business line in transferring it from Qwest. A quick search on Google using “vonage problem” +blog showed they were ripping a lot of people off. Letters to Vonage, Better Business Bureau, FCC, FTC, SEC, Federal Attorney General, and a lot of others had no affect. If fact, it seems the Administration arm of the Federal government has rolled over and died.

As a starter, we put our primary correspondence online with a page on our business web site. Anyone can read and see for themselves how bad the situation at Vonage and the Federal Administration is. Then we scanned Google again and located all those blogs about the problems at Vonage and added our comment to each, with a pointer to our web page. In a short time (no Google sandbox stopping this) we received many emails with others verifying what we had experienced and the traffic on the Vonage web page we created zoomed to the stratosphere. We posted the testimonies people sent us online with our page.

Reports of the problems at Vonage have now been reported in the Wall Street Journal (6/8/2006, page D1), and the stock price has dropped to almost zero from when the IPO was launched. Vonage is dying. It’ll be much like Enron, however, only with less noise. A lot of people will be left holding their losses because the Administrations do nothing. Our stuff is dated now; but nothing has been done and this Administration will hopefully be gone as people hold it accountable time after time.

The point here is that one person can create what is known as a blog swarm. The effect snowballs through what is referred to as the tail of the blog. The total traffic in the tail of the blog is far more that that of any major blog that gets those high traffic counts.

Want another example? For years the Southern Baptists has been run by a political force of old wineskins. A few years ago (June, 2006) the Southern Baptist bloggers scored a major victory by getting their candidate to win the election in an upset victory. Check it out. How much change takes place is still up in the air, but the bloggers have started it. There are lots of similar stories.

Blogs make your site dynamic, and you’ll see your blog posts showing up in the Google index within days if you already have a strong site. To make it really work, however, you need to visit the other blogs and comment there, pointing to your blog posts and pages.

Two big words of caution, however.

Stay on-topic. Over 99% of the comments coming into our blogs are killed at the host and the IPs black listed because they are trying to sell prescription drugs, casino games, and fake Rolex watches.
Make sure your facts are right and the writing has good grammar and correct spelling. One bad fact can destroy your entire argument.

Filed Under: Blogging, Internet Marketing

Using Blogs to Increase Web Traffic

March 6, 2011 By carl 1 Comment

Adding a good blog to your web site, in many cases, can dramatically increase your web traffic. We’ve seen it work. Let’s look at the strategy here and related costs.

As far as indirect costs – to make a blog work takes time. You’ll see from the strategy here it takes lots of time for both writing the blog and researching to write it.

Reports of the problems at Vonage have now been reported in the Wall Street Journal (6/8/2006, page D1), and the stock price has dropped to less that half of the price when the IPO was launched a few months ago. Vonage is dying. It’ll be much like Enron, however, only with less noise. A lot of people will be left holding their losses because the Bush Administration did nothing.

Want another example? For years the Southern Baptists has been run by a political force of old wineskins. In June of this year, the Southern Baptist bloggers scored a major victory by getting their candidate to win the election in an upset victory. Check it out. How much change takes place is still up in the air, but the bloggers have started it. There are lots of similar stories. Our blogging e-book has a few more. Get your own copy.

Two big words of caution, however.

Stay on-topic. Over 99% of the comments coming into our blogs are killed at the host and the IPs black listed because they are trying to sell prescription drugs, casino games, and fake Rolex watches.
2.

Make sure your facts are right and the writing has good grammar and correct spelling. One bad fact can destroy your entire argument.

Filed Under: Blogging, Internet Marketing