This is one of the workshops that I deliver to small businesses – I thought I would share the slides:
How to use a Blog to Market your Business
View more presentations from Clayton Wehner.
Posts Tagged ‘blogging’
How to use a blog to market your business
Thursday, June 10th, 2010Recommended Reading: The Corporate Blogging Book
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009The full title is the “The Corporate Blogging Book – Absolutely Everything You Need To Know To Get It Right” and rightly so.
This is a great title if you are new to blogging or want to read more on how blogging can be used in business. The first chapter is a great read all on it’s own and gives a good overview of all the common questions about blogging for business.
Through out the book there are business examples of good blogs as well as tips on what to write, the style of writing and who should write a blog.
For your larger corporates there are sections on the legal considerations and having a corporate blogging policy as your staff are probably already blogging!
It gives different uses for blogs whether they be for an internal or private group or for the general public, whether there will be just one or multiple authors.
I found this a really good read. It is a plain english overview of business blogging for the novice blogger.
It is also worth checking out Author Debbie Weil’s website.
Assorted Links and Stuff 2
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009A collection of great links and tools that I have come across over the past few weeks:
- 30+ Apps for Doing Business on Facebook
- Starting your own Blog? 29 Tips, Tutorials and Resources for New Bloggers
- Twitterholic.com – the Twitter users with the most followers
- Australia’s Top 50 Twitter Influencers
- Where should I place (Google) Ads on my Pages?
- OpenX – open source advertisement serving software
- Email campaign case studies (one good, one bad) from Seth Godin
- Getting ‘fast’ traffic to your Blog
Useful Article: Starting your First Blog
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009Maintaining a blog is great way to market your online business and a a fantastic search engine optimisation strategy – the search engines love blogs because they are a source of fresh, up-to-date content. If you write great content and contribute to your blog regularly, then your traffic will grow.
If you have your own web hosting, then you should run a standalone Wordpress installation for your blog – this is fast becoming the standard blogging platform. If you are just starting out, then use the free hosted platform, Wordpress.com. This will enable you to easily port over to a domain-based Wordpress installation at a later time.
Here’s an article that will help you start your first blog:
Action List: ‘Claim’ your blogs in Technorati
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009
Technorati is one of the many blog search, bookmarking and tagging websites that have proliferated on the web in recent years, although it is generally regarded by serious bloggers as the most ‘authoritative’ of the bunch.
According to the website, Technorati was founded to help bloggers to succeed by collecting, highlighting, and distributing the online global conversation. As the leading blog search engine and most comprehensive source of information on the blogosphere, Technorati indexes more than 1.5 million new blog posts in real time and introduce millions of readers to blog and social media content.
To get a piece of the action, sign up for a free Technorati account here, complete your profile and then start ‘claiming’ your blogs. To claim a blog, Technorati provides you with a line of code that you’ll need to paste onto your blog’s home page, so that the Technorati spider can confirm its ownership.
Once you have claimed your blog, it’s a good idea to setup an automated ‘ping’, which automatically alerts Technorati when a new post has been added. There are instructions on how to do this here: http://technorati.com/developers/ping/.
It’s also important that you display Technorati subscription buttons on your pages that allow people to ‘fave’ your blog. These buttons are provided in the form of HTML snippets after you ‘claim’. By displaying these buttons, your blog’s ‘authority’ and ‘fans’ will hopefully increase over time and deliver more traffic to your website.
Open your free account here:
Useful Link: Convert your blog content to a podcast using Odiogo
Thursday, January 22nd, 2009
I recently stumbled across a blog plug-in that converts your blog posts to audio automatically. Now your blog visitors can listen to your posts or subscribe to your posts via a podcast feed and listen on-the-go. And it’s free.
According to the website, Odiogo’s media-shifting technology expands the reach of your content: It transforms news sites and blog posts into high fidelity, near human quality audio files ready to download and play anywhere, anytime, on any device.
I trialled it with the Boomerang Books Blog and the Getaroom Travel Bites Blog and it works pretty well. It’s an American voice, but it’s quite clear and will certainly offer your customers something more than a textual experience. It’s also great for vision impaired visitors.
It’s worth a go – you can sign up for free on the Odiogo website at http://www.odiogo.com/index.php
Useful Link: Feedburner
Monday, January 19th, 2009
Feedburner, now owned by Google, is a service that enables you to syndicate your blog or website content via RSS, website widgets and email.
Sign up for a Feedburner account here: http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/home
Action List: Start a Blog
Tuesday, January 6th, 2009
Everybody’s heard of blogs, or ‘web logs’. A blog is basically an online diary, allowing an individual to upload content on a regular basis to the web. Not only are blogs used as a social medium, they are also ‘in vogue’ in the corporate world – many CEOs use blogs to communicate with their employees.
In the netpreneur world, there are many people who make a good living out of running their own blog….food for thought. I’ve recently heard of some bloggers who make upwards of $100,000 per year from advertising revenue on their blogs.
Operating a blog on your website is a good idea, but only if you have the discipline to contribute regularly to it and are willing to produce quality, unique content.
A well-maintained blog will result in good traffic to your website – blog software is typically geared for syndication through the search engines via RSS feeds and so a blog provides a good medium for getting your message out there.
Blogging software includes Wordpress and Blogger. I recommend Wordpress, as it can be hosted on your own domain and it’s quite easy to configure.
Some tips:
- Have a clear purpose for your blog
- Use a conversational tone – write how you speak
- Don’t stuff your blog full of keywords – the search engines won’t like it
- Create blog categories that contain keywords
- Use provocative, keyword-rich titles for your article titles
- Submit your URL to blog directories
- Vary your topics, the length of your content and posting times – keep it punchy
- Get a guest blogger
- Respond to people who post comments on your blog and encourage a web conversation
I recommend that prospective bloggers take a read of ProBlogger by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett. It’s a great book for those hoping to eventually make a living out of blogging.
Action List: Use Gravatars to build your online personality
Monday, January 19th, 2009As a netpreneur, it’s a good idea to subscribe to like-minded blogs and websites and to offer comments and suggestions to posts written by other authors. By posting well-written and useful tips and commentary, you can greatly bolster your credibility in a certain field – not to mention increase your search engine popularity through cross-linking with a thematically-similar website.
One way that you can set your comments apart from others on blogs and websites is by using Gravatars, or globally recognised avatars. A Gravatar is simply an image that follows you from blog to blog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. These normally take the form of a small portrait of the person adding the comment. Gravatars are associated with the author’s email address, so each time you enter your email address when posting to a website, your gravatar will also display (assuming that the blog has enabled their display).
Why would you use a gravatar? It allows readers to ‘put a face to a name’. An image of a commenter is instantly recognisable, particularly if you are a prolific commenter. In a world where time is short and web site pages are scanned, not read, the gravatar can provide a very important marker for indentification. Think of it as your own ‘pen pic’, similar to the portraits that appear next to regular columnists in the newspaper. And if you are a credible commentator, then it’s likely that your gravatar will prompt people to stop and read your comments (and hopefully visit your website).
It is recommended that you use the same gravatar image for all of your commenting and social media interaction – for example, your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and StumbleUpon images should all be the same. This serves to increase your brand recognition and the credence of your online personality on the web.
To set up a gravatar, visit: http://en.gravatar.com
Tags: blogging, blogs, brand, brand recognition, comments, facebook, gravatar, linkedin, online personality, search engine optimization, SEO, stumbleupon, twitter
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