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Author’s note: This is not the stuff that I do, but it’s what I should do.
5 Reasons to have a blog for your business
1. It’s environmentally friendly. Unless you are running a blog about your helicopter hunting/timber logging business venture. But not only is it green for the environment, it’s green for you. It takes up much less of your company’s business day since you no longer need to drive to cold calls, print out newsletters and manage mail merges.
2. It’s extremely cost-effective. Even if you feel the need to (ahem) hire a professional designer to “tweak your template” (more on that later), you should still save a ton of dough by not needing to do as much print advertising.
3. You will have an “auxiliary engine” to drive traffic to your company’s site. Put a link back to your company’s site. Use your blog profile tool to find local sites and bloggers and ask them if they are willing to trade links.
4. It can generate customer feedback and communication. Run a contest for your readers. Ask people for their opinion on your review of a local restaurant. Let people know you welcome comments by making that link more visible.
5. It’s fun! It’s a low stress way to promote your business without feeling like you are out there on a soapbox. Write what you enjoy writing about and they will come.
4 Do’s and Don’ts
Don’t be too negative too much. If you had a tough time with a client, or your favorite team/american idol contestant/politician lost, write about what you learned from it and respect others’ privacy and/or opinions.
Try to find a rhythm and stay with it. One interesting post a week is better than 7 entries that vary on “My Starbucks-Fueled Mini-Rant”, but keep your content as fresh as possible without sacrificing quality for quantity.
Be useful, or funny, or ahead of the crowd or any combination. Being creative doesn’t hurt either. Think about what kinds of questions your clients have had lately and how you can answer them.
Don’t blitz your readers with “bells and whistles”. We’ve all been to that site where so many “awesome”(bandwidth-hogging) features needed to load that we didn’t go past the home page.
3 Blogging Terms to Know
RSS: Almost synonymous with the term “Feed”, RSS stands for (in my opinion) Really Simple Syndication. It’s an easy way for your readers to keep up with your blog and make sure that they know when you have something new on the site. Of course, it’s up to your readers to decide to follow your blog, but putting a widget in your template (see below) suggesting that your readers to subscribe really helps things along.
Template: This is the term blogging services use for your blog’s layout and overall design. If you really want a distinctive look for your blog, such as colors based on your logo and custom backgrounds, etc, you should the editing options for your template before you go with it.
Widgets/Badges: Basically, those “bells and whistles” I was warning you about earlier. Like a good spice, use them only if necessary and they will work for you, not against you. Some examples of widgets are “Archives” that list your posts in chronological order, and Google’s Adsense which will place text ads on your blog by “sensing” the site’s content. (Which still doesn’t explain the Maalox ad that kept appearing on Jennsweb a few years ago.) Badges are items such as Flickr, which can display your Flickr images in a little window, and Twitter, which can display your most recent updates on your Twitter account.
2 FAQ’s
What should I blog about?
Almost anything. A post can be a photo, a story, an interesting link or all three combined. Don’t cast your net too wide. Think about the blog’s description (that little phrase underneath a blog’s title) and see if your entry would be something that someone finding your blog would find interesting as well.
How much time should I devote to this?
If you run a business, then you know how the word “busy” got in there. The best approach is the one that fits around your schedule. Blog on your coffee break if you want. As long as you get in the habit, don’t obsess over how much time you spend on it because…
#1 Rule: Have fun with it!
Remember, it’s not the annual report to the stockholders. Because who gets excited about reading those?
Posted 4 months, 4 weeks ago at 8:49 pm. Add a comment
This is an article I found today on Lorelle’s amazing Wordpress blog. It’s the perfect answer to that ever-popular question, “How do I get my site to rank high in Google?” I wish there was a “silver bullet answer” to this question too, but it’s a not so much a magic formula as it is a carefully planned campaign.
Lorelle does a great job of explaining the various factors, but in a nutshell, Google bases it’s page ranking system on a combination of the following factors:
Links: Quality over quantity. Don’t go for those “pay for us to link to you” services. Google prefers a few links to your site on well established web sites rather than a ton of links on spam sites.
Domain Age: Spam sites tend to be fly-by-night operations and the longer your site has been around, the better. However, just letting your site sit there on the server isn’t enough. Google also notices the freshness of your site’s content.
Click Through Rate: Google checks on how people find your site and how they get there, whether via a search engine or from a bookmarking site.
Trends, fads and seasons: Keywords have trends too. So you can probably stop typing in “Paris Hilton Video” into your meta-tags now. ;^}
Posting Frequency: Like Alex the Lion says in Madagascar “You know, keep it fresh!”. The more you reward your loyal visitors with useful new information, the more they will visit and recommend your site via incoming links.
Keywords: There are a few areas where it’s really important to place the words that you think people will use to search for your site. Titles, as in the title that shows up at the top of your browser when you view a page, links, headings and tags.
Traffic: How heavily your site is visited, which pages people go to and how long they spend clicking around.
Code: It’s important to keep your site’s code clean and easy to scan through. Hiding your text in a fancy animation or burying important info under tons of scripting makes the engine work harder. I tend to think of code as being like motor oil, the cleaner it is, the smoother your site runs.
Posted 1 year, 4 months ago at 12:49 pm. 1 comment
Advertiser: Someone who wants to place their ads on a site.
API: A little bit of code that acts as a go-between for your site and another web site that is providing some sort of service on the page i.e. Google’s Adsense.
Browser Cache: Your browser program, Internet Explorer for example, will keep a record of your internet wanderings for a short while. Sometimes there is so much behind the scenes site traffic, that your browser starts to behave like an overloaded airport control tower and a lot of flights (pages) are left circling, waiting to land. Clearing your cache on a regular basis, keeps your web browser running faster.
Channels: A method Google has for organizing your advertising. It allows you to become your own Marketing Department and track which ads are the most effective for your site.
Click: A term used by advertisers and publishers meaning when an ad is clicked on with the user’s mouse. If you are deciding on a publisher for your ads, it’s important to define how a click is counted. Is it determined by each time the click happens (no matter if it’s from the same user), or does each click have to be from a different user?
Click-Through-Rate: A percentage that is determined by the number of clicks on an ad, divided by the number of impressions. For example, your banner ad for an upcoming sale is delivered 100 times on a web page, and one person clicks it, then the CTR would be 1%. This is a good measure for determining the effectiveness of a particular ad campaign.
Contextual Advertising: When the API that generates ads for your page does it by scanning your content for keywords.
Cost-Per-Action (CPA): The amount an advertiser must pay when a user completes an action once they have clicked onto their ad. For example, a user might click on an ad for a supermarket, but in order for that click to be counted, they have to enter a contest via a form on the page that ad took them to.
Cost-Per-Click (CPC): The amount an advertiser must pay when a user clicks on their ad.
Cost-Per-Thousand-Impressions (CPM): The amount an advertiser must pay for every thousand impressions of their ad viewed by a the site’s users. What exactly counts as an impression? That is a term that is definitely up for grabs in the online marketplace. What it boils down to is a question of you and your advertiser service agreeing on what an impression should be. (Geekery: the M stands for Mille or, a thousand in French)
(Wikipedia has a pretty good breakdown of the click/cost thing here)
Destination URL: When your page’s ads contain links, this is the URL of what they are linking to. This is important for blocking competitors’ ads from appearing on your site.
Display URL: This is the URL displayed on an ad to identify the advertiser’s site to the viewer.
Effective CPM: An effective Cost Per Thousand Impressions rate (eCPM for short) is determined by calculating the amount paid per thousand clicks. If your site has received 10,000 views of a page that you host ads on, and Service A pays you $50 then your eCPM rate for Service A is $5. If you are the publisher of the ads,you can use this to compare with other services you host and you can gauge which services can gain you more revenue. If you are the advertiser, you can use this as a measure of which ad campaigns are the most effective.
Link Clicks: A term for when a user clicks on a link unit.
Link Click Through Rate (CTR): The number of link clicks, divided by the number of link impressions.
Link eCPM: Similar to the standard eCPM (see above), the cost of a thousand impressions for a particular link. This helps to a publisher calculate the amount they will earn per every thousand links that are shown to their users.
Link Impressions: The number of times a link unit is viewed.
Link Unit: An advertising term for an ad format where a link is displayed that is relevant to the content of that page. Each link takes the user to a page that contains ads related to that link.
Page Impression: Defined as every time a user views a page displaying ads. This is a separate calculation than the number of times a particular ad is viewed.
Publisher: Someone who is hosting ads on their site.
Didn’t see a term you were looking for? Need a second opinion? Adglossary has a complete list for your enjoyment.
Posted 1 year, 4 months ago at 3:53 pm. Add a comment
So, you want to set up a web site…
I have had a few clients whose initial contact with me is along the lines of, “I’ve reserved a name with a hosting company, and now I have no idea where to go from here.” Since I’ve been there myself, and have spent a lot of time on the phone with clients answering questions about C-Panels and bandwidth, I thought it would be a good idea to write something like a field guide to hosting companies. Continue Reading…
Posted 1 year, 9 months ago at 1:03 pm. 8 comments
