Tag Archives: blog

Ask a Question, business, Consultancy, sales

If You Are Thinking Of Getting Into Blogging

I was out about this weekend and was asked on more than one occasion why I blog. I blog for a number reasons. Some personal and some professional.

On the professional side:

1. It demonstrates expertise knowledge and expertise in chosen skill year.

2. Increases Google page ranking and key words with relevant fresh content.

3. As a sales marketing tool, to build references through comments and the online community for consultancy work.

4. Generate income through paid advertising.

On the Personal side:

1. As a personal development log

2. to give help and give something back to people trying to understand and use this technology

3. For personal enjoyment of developing writing and pr skills

Chris Brogan is highly accomplished writer and blogger he had this advice to say about blogging in different media spheres.

  1. If your goal is to be an entertainment or news blog, be very clear that it’s that and not a “fun” blog. Consider splitting off your personal or fun blog.
  2. If your blog is to be your business, treat it like that. Get into stats. Get into building audience. Get into delivering something unique. Don’t straddle back and forth on this.
  3. If the goal is to be a great community resource, mix your blogging time with time spent reaching out to the community you propose to serve. If that’s an offline opportunity, like something local, be there. Be active. Be a connector.
  4. If you’re going to be a professional about your blog, carve out the time to do it right. Never, ever, ever post a “sorry I haven’t posted lately” blog post again. Ever.
  5. Up the ante on delivering original material. Get outside the echo chamber. Writing a me-too blog isn’t the way to build your blog to the levels you seek to attain.
  6. It’s okay to use a personal voice. In fact, there’s no point blogging if you’re going to write like a cold robot. But keep personal and useful in balance.
  7. If you are attempting to do real business via your blog, look for ways to convert readers into customers.
  8. If it’s just an ad revenue business, compete, and be honest about that. Compete with others in your space for audience, value, and better deals. My point in this regard is that going halfway into the water doesn’t make you less wet.
  9. If your blog is the premier source of information for nonprofits, for photographers, for whatever, then be sure you’re scouring news feeds and finding information outside the blogosphere to keep that relationship informed.
  10. Make a point of engaging your community often in the comments section, on their blogs, on the other social networks where you cross paths.

    11. chrisbrogan, 50 Ways to Take Your Blog to the Next Level, Sep 2008

 

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fun, Marketing, sales

killer blog posts (How to)

Sit comfortably, take a deep breath and relax. What is a rather an ambiguous blog post title and is meant to be taken both ways. You can kill your blog by the posts you put on it or you can do the reverse. This blog post is about how to make your blog posts work for you in a given time allotment.        

A couple of days ago I thought seriously about making Whooah.biz a private blog. My blog is very much a sort of a development to try out new ideas that I will then use on www.WorkConneXions.com or for clients. Waking up on a Sunday morning I read some of the weeks past posts and noticed a few too many errors. There are number reasons for this. My brain works faster than my hands can type. I may suffer from a form of dyslexia. What every the reason the blog posts were not of a sufficient quality to be published. As I thought about this, and talked it over on twitter and with friends, I realised that I was not the only one and that you do not need a degree in journalism or English to make a contribution to blogsphere.

As Sherrilynne from www.Strivepr.com pointed out, nothing leaves the office without being proof read by someone else. My brother Sebastian who is starting work at local law firm www.dc.co.im said that he prints everything out as you just cannot see the mistakes on a computer screen. That is enough justification for all blog writers to contemplate how you are publishing something.  If it is for yourself then fine, but if you are going to share it with blogsphere, how are you going to know if you are achieving what you have set out to do?

Below is step plan that endeavours to insure success in this field:

1.      To write you need to concentrate. To concentrate you need to be relaxed. However you do that is up to you. Whether it is a breath of fresh air or taking a deep breath. Make sure you do it.

2.      There are lots of blog post out there that talk about the writing of a blog post, how you should repeat the theme in the last  paragraph etc. Fundamentally a blog post can be anything that you want as long as it achieves your goals. My approach is too give it a start, a middle and an end and to make sure that it has a meaning and relevance. There is no easy way to do this but the more you do it the easier and better it becomes like anything else. How will we insure that it achieves your goals? By reading below.

3.      Check your blog post, checking it may sound simple but if there is one thing in life that you can not do enough of it is checking. Here are some of my suggestions, you may want to apply one or two of these in any given situation.

A.     Save the blog post in different form than you have written it. So if you have written it in Word than save it as text file and proof read it.

B.     The great thing with computers is that you can increase the size of the text. Why make it hard to read, increase it.

C.     Studies have shown that MS Sans Serif in grey on a white background is the easiest font for the brain to read. Of course one shoe does not fit all so you may have to experiment a bit.

D.     Ask a colleague or a friend to proof read it. This often helps with total comprehension of the piece.

E.      Take a break and check it much later when the brain has forgotten what you have written and you can see it with fresh eye

F.      Print it out, there is nothing like sitting somewhere else and checking it on a different media form

G.     Employ the services of document proofing company. Like this one http://www.betteredit.com/

That’s about all that I can think of for now. With these controls in place either you will succeed or you will find out that you and your friends are not very good at english.

 

 

Marketing, sales

How Bouncy Your Blog Is. Will Tell You How Good Your Design Is?

3 Comments

First welcome to my new blog design.

What do I mean when I say bouncy, well pretty much as it sounds. Bounce rate is a term used in website traffic analyses. It happens when a visitors leaves your website after just landing on one webpage. How is that possible? I hear you ask. On that beautifully design website of yours. With all that information and well written blog posts. Well it’s easy. For the large part it comes down to design presuming that your blog posts are readable and interesting. (this is the test)

There is no agreed definition for what attributes a bounce some say it in the first 10 or 15 seconds that a user leaves your site other say it is failing to click on another page. My bounce rate I have to admit was too high. This is probably due to monetisation on the old site. I genuinely believe that monetisation offers extra services to users. Unfortunately it was probably too much so I will now have to seek a balance.

According to Avinash Kaushik:

“It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying

Now there is goal to go for! what are your bounce rates like?

Consultancy, Guest Bloggers, Uncategorized, Work Connexions SMO

How to Business Blog Without Being Unprofessional

Writing on your blog is not gossip. While you could get plenty of traffic from your industry by spreading juicy titbits about your competitors and colleagues you will more likely grab yourself a bad reputation rather than more work or industry profile. Language can be an issue. I am not talking about swearing and such, most business people would know better than to drop bad language into a marketing tool. What I mean is tone and sophistication. You have to fit the voice to the audience. Of course I am pretty laid back here on this blog, while there are quite a few CEOs reading they tend to not be the stuffy stiff necked types (I know, I get emails from them!). You have to tune the language you use appropriately.

The best type of posts you can make, particularly in a service industry, is successful case studies.

  • What was their situation like before?
  • What were their goals or problem?
  • How did you work with them?
  • How did everything work out?
  • …

Most clients would be glad of the publicity, you just need to speak to them and get permission. Obviously some will not want specifics mentioning (particularly figures) or even to be named. That’s all fine. What matters is results and that you provide enough detail to be believable.

Talk to your clients about it and you won’t get into trouble. Going behind their backs is when you start getting into the sticky stuff.

The same is true when you want to write about exciting happenings in your own business. I imagine bloggers at Apple and Microsoft have a real hard time keeping mouths shut. There will be policies on what can and can not be talked about. If not, get some. Fast.

Many companies have footers on their emails

  • NOT to be repeated or reproduced
  • OK to email to company
  • OK to email outside company to specified individuals
  • Freely distribute

You can do the same and add a tick box for blogging if freely distribute doesn’t cover that.

Most business niches have news, tactics and events that are safe to blog about. This though is mostly filler. You can get that stuff anywhere. To make it more valuable you need to dig deep and find your hook or angle on it.

The best solution, if you haven’t already got a rich source of content to draw on, is to create some news. Could you run a competition? A survey? Interview some industry figures?

These don’t need to be massive ventures, scale to fit. While one past client of mine had a terrific success year on year with a global survey that was mentioned in television and newspapers around the world, another simply surveyed their own clients and as well as producing an excellent PR story also learned a great deal about what their customers look for and feel.

Bottom line you need to answer the question; “Could this have appeared on a competitors blog with no major changes?“. If the answer is yes you have a bland post and you need to work on it some more.

Just remember you can be interesting without being unprofessional. Focus on your reader. What is useful to them? How have you or your products helped people and businesses just like them?

Most of all, what makes you different to all the other businesses they could go to?

Visit Chris at http://www.chrisg.com/

Marketing, Traffic, Uncategorized, Work Connexions SMO

Who Should Publish the Company Blog?

Among the questions executives ask about social media is where should it be located? Who should launch, manage and publish the blog(s), vlog(s) and/or podcast(s)? The obvious choices are marketing, public relations, human resources or communications. However, making the right decision is both critical and complex.

To some extent, the answer lies within the internal structure of the business. Taking the org. chart into acount, to determine where social media should live, a business might ask questions such as these:

  1. Who is most likely to understand the use of social media and then to use it in ways that benefit our customers, our employees and our business most?
  2. Who has the time, budget and expertise to create engaging communications?
  3. Who is least likely to use social media to market and sell products?
  4. Who is most likely to use social media to draw customers into conversation with us; thereby, developing loyal customers, brand evangelists and new customers who appreciate our efforts to give them a voice?

These questions are the basis for the internal discussion. Whoever the business chooses to host social media, they must be excellent writers, they must be creative, they must have access to everyone within the business, they must be familiar with the customers and the communities in which the business has locations, and they must be trusted as open and honest communicators. Furthermore, they must have the courage and the ability to challenge managers and executives who want to turn social media into a bottom line tool.

Yes, social media, if done correctly, will result in return on investment in a variety of forms, including an increase in loyal customers who buy more and who talk positively about the company; an increase in the ability to produce more innovative and better products and services based on customer feedback; the ability to improve the company at every level, again based on customer feedback; and an increase in new customers as they learn about and come to trust the company.

That is the 10,000-foot view of where social media should reside and what to expect from social media. But like any strategy, before launching social media as part of your communications mix, every business should analyze the tools to understand what they do and how they may be used and how social media is and is not the right fit for your business. Using these communications tools is not to be done lightly.

My best advice is to study every detail and discuss all the pros and cons. And then if you decide social media is a good fit for your business, launch the tools internally first. Get employees from every functional area involved, and ask them to be your sounding boards. As in most things, employees know your customers best, and they will contribute incredibly good suggestions and recommendations, if you engage them and give them buy in.

For more information about Lewis Green visit him at http://lgbusinesssolutions.typepad.com/solutions_to_grow_your_bu/

development, Personal, work, writing

How Many Times do you Need to Blog

 I was just reading some history about Darren Rowse and how he got into blogging. He recommended that if you want to climb the ranks of blogs you would need to be blogging quite a few times a day. While I can see the effect in this: it would keep the search engines busy and your readers too. Most of us being frank probably only have one really good idea every couple days so blogging more than that could became a bit stale. Of course if my readers wanted to hear my opinions about the American elections and the price of oil and gold I could be persuaded, I would still probably want to blog within a team. Just for the editorial checks… What are your thoughts? would you like to write severely posts a day?

Uncategorized

How do you blog when you sell uninteresting products?

As the title of the blog suggests this is a rather unusual question. I am sure that there are many bloggers out there who would tell you not to even begin. Well I am not sure that I agree. In fact when I read a lot of the “How To Make Money Online” blogs, I felt that they do not have anything to sell. Of course this is an illusion, as they are they are selling what they are seeking and they are doing this with nothing more then their own desire to make money. There are hundreds of money making blogs out there. I am sure there are just as many toilet roll companies. If the money making blog can successfully sustain interest in their topic then the question is how does the toilet roll company, when intrinsically there is nothing of great interest in their product.

An answer to this question is simply that they talk about how they are selling their product. Just the same as for example a money making blog……