5 Ways To Use A Blog
Blogging for business can be any number of things depending on your business model. I have found a blog to be a great marketing tool. But many businesses use blogs in different ways. Here are 5 ways you can use a blog for your business.
- Branding – A blog can be a great way to brand yourself. You can use it to communicate important messages about your business periodically so that your customers and potential customers understand your brand better and engage with you on your blog in discussions about your brand.
- Search engine optimization – Many businesses use their blog for SEO. They target their keywords in blog posts repeatedly until they gain a certain level of search engine traction.
- Reputation management – A blog can also be a great reputation management tool. Use it to improve your position in the search engines as well as your reputation online.
- Social media marketing – Many bloggers take their blog into the social media arena and use it for reaching out to others in their niche in a very social way.
- Customer Service – Other businesses use their blog as a customer service tool, fielding questions about their products and services that they then can use to engage their audience in a conversation.
If you use your blog for any of these purposes, then you are on the right track, but these are not the only ways you can blog. In what ways do you use your company blog?
5 Ways To Promote Your Blog
How do you promote your blog? Do you do it effectively? Do you do it at all?
Of course, there are more than one way to catch a tiger. What works for one business may not work for another. Typically, however, a business can benefit from a multi-pronged approach to promoting their blog. If you are looking for ways to promote your business blog, try these 5 methods.
- Really Simple Syndication – RSS feeds. Every blog should have one. When a subscriber clicks the orange RSS icon, they will subscribe to your blog and receive a notice in their news reader every time you update your blog.
- Subscribe By E-mail – Some people just haven’t figured out RSS yet. Include a Subscribe By E-mail button for those readers.
- Blog Promotion Newsletter – Similar to Subscribe By E-mail, you can send out a weekly or monthly blog promotion newsletter to drive steady traffic to your blog. Your subscribers will look forward to getting your newsletter every month and revisit your blog.
- Social Media Marketing – Promote your blog through Google+, Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, and the many other bookmarking services online. Use social media effectively.
- Video Marketing – Upload a new video once a week to your YouTube channel. This will drive new traffic to your website and blog on a regular basis.
Use these 5 methods to promote your blog and you will see your traffic climb steadily.
How To Geotarget Your Local Blog
Instead of focusing your local blog on specific keywords designed to push your content up in the search engines (what some people call spam and others refer to as SEO), why not use your local influencers – people and organizations – as well as ordinary people to geotarget your local blog?
I’m talking about your business blog, and I’m talking about an unusual way to accomplish local SEO without simply focusing on churning out keyword-based content designed solely for SEO.
There are a number of ways you can accomplish this, but here are 5 ways that you can use local people and organizations to help you SEO your website locally.
- Hold a contest in which the winner is highlighted on your blog.
- Write a community service blog post once a week where you highlight a local person or organization for its service to the community.
- Choose a customer and make him/her the Customer of the Week. Write up a feature story about that person.
- Once a week or once a month, choose someone who is not a customer and ask them to try your product or service, then interview them about it an publish what they tell you (even if it’s negative).
- Write a story highlighting the 1,000th customer of the week, or something similar.
There are a lot of ways to geotarget your website, but if you try one of these five methods, then the content can naturally be geotargeted for maximum SEO benefits. Just be sure that you say what part of town or the neighborhood the person or organization you are focusing on lives in or does business in. You’ll see your local website geotargeted in no time.
5 Ways A Blog Improves Your Website’s SEO
Successful Internet marketers know that a blog is a great way to improve your search engine optimization efforts. Here are 5 specific ways that a blog can improve your SEO.
- Fresh, original content – A blog adds fresh, original content to your website every day. Search engine spiders thrive on fresh content. Every time you write a blog post, you will invite the search bots to your website again to crawl it and look for new content.
- Improve your internal link structure – A blog on your website with the right links pointing to the right pages can improve your internal link structure. This in turn improves your overall search engine rankings.
- Attracts inbound links – A good blog will attract inbound links from all over the Web. Those inbound links will help improve your website’s SEO.
- Increases you chances at achieving high rankings – Every single web page you post is another chance to rank in the search engines. Each blog post is seen by the search engines as a separate web page. So the more blog posts you have, the more chances you have to rank for your important keywords.
- High powered niche marketing – Over time, as you write more and more blog posts targeting specific keywords, those blog posts are more likely to rank for the keywords you are targeting – and your blog as well. An aged blog with highly targeted content with an awesome inbound link portfolio is better suited to rank high in the search engines.
Now that you know 5 ways your blog can improve your search engine rankings, why not start a blog today?
5 Websites To Spy On Your Competition Easily
Spying on your competition isn’t as hard as you can imagine. There are open places on the web where your competition hangs out and where they publicly disclose what they are doing with their products and marketing initiatives. Here are 5 easy places to spy on your competition.
- LinkedIn – There are so many companies actively using LinkedIn these days that it’s worth a look just to see if your competition is there. If so, follow them. Read their questions and their answers and see who their friends are. You’ll be able to tell a lot just by that alone.
- Facebook – It’s hard to find a company without a Facebook presence these days. Find your competition, follow their fan page and see what they are putting out on their updates page.
- Twitter – Twitter is one of the easiest places to spy on the competition. Find them and follow them. Everything they say will be visible to you. Also, subscribe to alerts that let you know when your competition is mentioned on Twitter.
- Quora – Quora is a fairly new website that is growing in popularity. All kinds of people go there to ask and to answer questions of one sort or another. If your competition is on Quora then you can follow them and see what they are asking, and what they are saying in their answers. What’s more, you can do much of it anonymously.
- Company Blog – Finally, subscribe to the RSS feed of your competition’s company blog. You’ll know as much as you need to know.
Spying on the competition isn’t hard. You can do it online in just a few minutes a day and at relatively low cost.
Google Starts Small Business Blog
Google’s blogs seem like they get a fresh start every day. From PPC and analytics to Google AdSense, Google has something to say about all kinds of things. The latest topic is small business.
The Google Small Business Blog will address the following topics of interest to small business owners:
- AdSense
- AdWords
- Apps
- Gmail
- Analytics
- Google Docs
- Google Places
- YouTube
- Upcoming events
- And other small business topics
It seems that the small business blog will cover a lot of topics that are already covered on other Google blogs except that you’ll be able to get a lot of the same information under one umbrella. It also looks like a way for Google to promote all of its offerings targeted toward small business owners. So is it safe to say it’s self serving?
I’d say that’s an unfair statement. It’s about as self serving as any other small business blog. The difference is, this one’s published by Google. So what does that mean? Two things, I think:
- The information will come from a credible source
- And the information will be naturally biased toward Google’s products
Both of those are a positive. But I wouldn’t stop reading your other Internet marketing blogs.
Should You Respond To Negative Comments About Your Business?
Should you respond to negative comments about your business on other websites? Ideally, you’d want to have those conversations on your own blog. A good strategy to use to get people over to your blog for a conversation about your products and services is to write a blog post that addresses a concern made publicly elsewhere. Then, visit the site on which the comment was made and make a short statement about the comment with a link to your site for the fuller explanation. Your comment might look something like this:
Thanks for addressing that issue. You might be interested in this explanation (and include the link here).
This tells people that you take their concerns seriously. It also tells them that you are willing to talk about it. But it also gets them to your blog to talk about it. By getting the conversation going on your website, you can control the flow of the conversation while giving people a chance to voice their concerns and deal with the issue directly where it makes the most sense to do so.
Call it reputation management. But we call it common sense.
The Best Reputation Management Tool You Have
Reputation management is quickly becoming one of the most important aspects of doing business online. You never know when a competitor, an employee, or a customer will go on the warpath and start messing with the world’s perception of you and your brand. But you can combat the negatives long before they start cropping up. And you can do it with a tool that you should already be using.
I’m talking about your blog. Your company blog is the best reputation management tool you have. You know why? Because you own the means and the velocity of production.
Look at it this way: A blog can be updated every day – even multiple times a day. And every blog post is a separate web page. The more web pages you produce that use your brand or company name, image, or likeness in, the more content you spread around. And the older that content is with the more links it can gain, the better off you will be in the long run. It makes it harder for the naysayers to move their content up.
Of course, you can never make it impossible for them. But why give them a small hill to climb when you can manage a daily blog and make that hill bigger. A blog is your best reputation management tool.
Keeping Your Company Blog Safe And Secure
These days, it seems like everyone has a blog. While the vast number of blogs on the Internet might seem to lessen the chances that your’s will be the victum of hacking or spamming, the greater quantity of blogs out there only encourages more of these annoying pests to attack.
In the Internet marketing world, spamming has unfortunately become a popular way to get free links, referals, etc. While legitimate Internet marketing firms such as Reciprocal Consulting look down on these sorts of black hat practices, the most annoying thing about these spammers is that some people actually click on these links, hence giving them a reason to continue to do it. If everyone knew how to spot spam and no one ever clicked a spam link, they would probably die out, but unfortunately this is not the case.
So, as long as there will be spammers and hackers, there will also be those who wish to put an end to it, and a lot of these programs are not only free, but coded specifically for your needs. The best example is a self-hosted WordPress blog. Due to ever growing popularity, the WordPress blog has become a prime target for spammers, both human and robot controlled, but by the same token, so has the number of anti-spam WordPress plug-ins increased. There are also a few other ways to protect your self hosted WordPress blog.
- Choose your password wisely- it may seem like elementary knowledge but believe it or not, many people don’t know what makes a password good. The first step is to choose something that is easy to remember, or something that you can write somewhere you will always be able to look it up if you forget what it is. Worst case scenario, you can always have the password sent to your email address, but that should only be the last resort. I personally have a password that includes numbers and letters, both lower and upper-case. The further your password is from a coherent English word or phrase, the better, which is why the combination of numbers and letter is best.
- Check your settings- The WordPress self hosted blog has a lot of built in features to help protect your blog, many of which can be found in the settings. Many times, an effort to allow more user interaction via comments on a blog will result in more spam, so what I have found to be the best settings for comments is allowing anyone to post, but first requiring myself or another admin to approve the comment. Once a comment is approved for a user, then comments from that user no longer require approval. This way, anyone who’s posted before can feel more welcome posting, which could increase visitor loyalty. There are also a number of great plug-ins available on the WordPress.com site which can help you deal with spam and security. These are conveniently organized by category, so performing a search for “anti-spam” or “security” should get you a plug-in that works the way you want it to.
- Watch Those Links- WordPress blogs have a handy feature on the dashboard that tells you who is linking to you. This is a great way to network, but also a good way to see when people are linking to you, even if you don’t want them to. Should you encounter a website that is saying bad things aboout you, or one with a large readership that might send unwanted traffic your way, you can easily see this and send a kind email over to ask the administrator at the other site to remove the link.
There are plenty of more advanced tactics to protecting your blog, but these are the most basic, and believe it or not, the ones most often overlooked.
Just How Much Has the Internet Changed Marketing Efforts?
For those of you just popping online before work, I’ll give you the short answer: To immeasurable lengths. For those with a little more time on their hands, I’ll try to sum it all up the best I can, but don’t be surprised if I leave a lot of information out – this is a very broad topic.
In fact, I may not get very far from a single topic concerning how the Internet has changed, because something occured to me the other day, as to just how different the world is with the Internet, and how hard it would be for most of us to go back to the early 90′s, before everything we know and love about said Internet. What came to mind was not how many great resources for information are available thanks to the Internet, or how easy it is to book a hotel, buy a car, find a friend, or stay in touch. I’d like to say that the simple pleasures of cuteoverload.com popped into my head, but the thought was not so quaint.
No, my mind decided to remind me how easy it would be for a 13 year old to ruin me. Odd, I agree, but hear me out.
In 1992, what would a 13 year old need to accomplish in order to get his or her opinion seen, spread and confirmed? Perhaps a paper route, a friend who’s parents worked at the Daily News, a good deal of editing, a petition…the list could go on, but to quickly convey my point, that child would need to go to great lengths to have even a few hundred people see his review on the newest Nintendo game, or perhaps his favorite place to eat in his small town.
Fast forward to 2008, and what do we see on the Internet? Blogs, review sites, forums – and lots of them – many members on these sites of which are 13-18 year olds ranting about their uninformed opinions, trashing companies, and incoherantly attempting to disuade the world from making the same mistake they did by going with the cheaper model. Don’t let their lack of formal education and bad grammar fool you – these people have an amazing influence on the world.
But a few hundred-thousand teens aren’t so scary, right? What can they do to hurt your business? Well, imagine someone searches for your company because they can’t remember the website URL, and just as they’re about to click on your site they see the next search result, an excerpt from a high ranking blog: “Company makes crappy products”. Or maybe it’s worse. Maybe, the excerpt under the result, chosen by the search engine, reads something more like: “Company owner John Smith likes little boys”.
Yeah, that’s pretty scary.
Fear not, friend, the Internet is a very big place, so the chances of someone singling out your business over the rest is as unlikely as the number of businesses out there are many; but who really wants to take the chance? The fact is, simple Preventative Reputation Management can save you a huge hassle, as well as a lot of spend, later on.
The basic idea behind Reputation Management is to populate search results with positive content concerning your business, and it is much better if all those good pieces of information reguarding your business show up in the first 20 results, instead of those frightening 13 year olds who know more about the Internet than a lot of adults, with a brutal opinion, and 120wpm typing “skillz”.
If you’d like to know more about how to protect your online reputation, please don’t hesitate to contact an Internet Marketing Firm such as Reciprocal Consulting today, and ask how.
Self Hosted Blog or Website?
In case you’ve been dying to know the answer to this question, the answer is both.
A personalized, custom built Website gives a business many freedoms concerning structure, content, and additional applications, such as shopping carts, forms, dynamic flash interfaces, and more, plus a very fresh, from-scratch, start. While many of these things may be available on a self hosted Blog, there is a difference between having a recognizable format and having one that may very well cause a user to bounce from your page. Self hosted Blogs, while capable of hosting many things that a website can, have an expected format, and should be used primarily for content. Content refers to onsite, html readable text, and links. This includes headers, footers, side bars, body text, posts, etc.
Now, what is the meaning behind this question, and more importantly, why the need for both?
The simple answer:
Blogs are becoming increasingly popular, to the point of absurdity. Every other person who is active on the internet these days has at least one blog to which they contribute, and many have two or three. Still, some have more even than that! So why join the crowd?
First of all, all the well tuned on and off site optimization in the world will not turn leads into conversions. For your sites ROI (return on investment) goals, more than likely there is a thank you page, order confirmation page, or some similar page which contains a tracking code. This is how you tally conversions, and when pitted against clicks, impressions, or monthly budget (depending on your campaign), you can measure ROI. There is a key factor between the initial lead and the conversion: Your Website
I’ve discussed how your optimized keywords and on site content need to relate to eachother, but these things should also be related to the design and structure of your website. If a lead comes to your site expecting to find a list of available products, easy to use shopping cart and easy checkout, more than likely, they will not find this on a Blog.
Another example, on the flip side, is content. While your site’s page content is crucial to optimization, suppose there is a good deal more information pertaining to your business that you wish to share with your potential clients or customers. Having all this information on a website that is also being used for checkout and browsing may bog things down for the user because, as I mentioned earlier, the quicker and easier it is for them to order and pay, the better the chance they will do just that. Adding a link on your site to a Blog about your company and it’s products, as well as news about upcoming products or services, is the best way to share large amounts of information without interfering with their shopping or browsing experience.
Additionally, having “sister sites” which link to eachother, one of which being a Blog containing feeds, news, links from Social Media Blog profiles, and lots of key content, is a good way to increase relevance and page rank, as well as targeted traffic. You can link relevant posts in the Blog to product pages on your site (and to other relevant posts within the Blog itself), give the user more opportunities to contact you with questions, and provide more than enough information that may already answer their inqueries.
There is a good deal of optimization that goes into a successful Blog (be it Sponsored Ads or Natural Search), but the beauty is, traffic coming to one site will lead to the other, and there is a clean, concise, well designed format which makes it easier for your leads to convert to sales.