July 8, 2008
A friend of mine forwarded me an article today, titled “Blogs: “Hot-air” or must have business tool?” that examines the value of blogging for SMBs in Chicago, but has a fatal flaw - they don’t look at the forward value of the blog, being ahead of the curve and not looking at the intrinsic value of blogging.
The three questions the reporter asked were:
- Do you read blogs?
- Do you think of blogs when you need to solve a problem or find information?
- What are your thoughts about blogs?
Not suprisingly, her sampling of 100 business executives in the Chicago area replied overwhelmingly (98%) that they didn’t read blogs and didn’t consider blogs when they needed to find information. To the third question, the responses were more mixed.
The fatal flaw with looking at blogs is that a blog isn’t by its nature any different from a website, except that it is more connected, easier to publish, easier to subscribe, and often has a more personal nature, including the ability to comment on articles.
For myself, I don’t nessisarily think of “reading blogs” but YES, I do search for “tips on <topic>” and other queries … more often than not, these cutting edge topics are found in the format of a blog.
When I discuss with our clients the benefits of blogging and the requirements / commitments required to maintain a blog I stress that it is not a magic tool that will “poof” get them business. Instead, what I try to explain to them is that “blogging” is a way for them to easily communicate their information to the public, potentialy build links back to their website, and also use as an outlet to share their thoughts. In this way, it gives consumers an opportunity to get to know the business better, instead of relying on paid marketing materials such as advertisements or brochures to make a decision.
Is a “blog” the right tool for every business? No, probably not. HOWEVER, I can share one very good example recently of where a blog would have been very valuable in making a purchasing decision.
My wife and I are getting our driveway done and it is nearly impossible to sort out which bids are better than others - the range of bids from low to high is well over $1,000. Ultimately though, the bids are all about the same work that will be done. So it is up to us to try and make a decision based on a little prayer that we make the right decision.
I did some searching on google, yahoo, etc. to see if I could find SOMETHING about any of them and most had nothing out there.
This would have been a perfect opportunity for the paver to have a blog - show some of his work, share some tips on how to select a paver, and other similar topics that probably would have made me select that person, rather than one of the competitors who I couldn’t find anything about.
Would I have “read his blog” or “remembered the name” ? Probably not, but it would have been VALUABLE to him. For the incremental cost of less than $100 year (or free with blogger!) and maybe an hour a month, this potential paving company could have landed a $5,000 contract. How many other customers over the course of a year could he win over other companies because they got to know him and his crew?
How many other people out there similarly search for service providers - electricians, plumbers etc? and find nothing?
In addition to not looking at blogging as what it is, the author misses the point that you have to be ahead of the curve to succeed in business. It would be like business owners in 1996 saying that they didn’t see the value of having a website or that only the big companies need to have one. Blogging and social media marketing in general are in their infancy and as the “kids” get older they will EXPECT that businesses have blogs or at least a strong personal presence on the internet.
In defense of the author, she is right, not all businesses “Need” a blog, and most can probably get along just fine without one, but it is absolutely an important marketing tool to discuss with your CMO or marketing agency so you can make an informed decision.
Ultimately, this post in itself shows the value of a blog. Because I have this blog, I can respond to business news or articles that otherwise I wouldn’t have a platform to discuss.
What are your thoughts?
Posted in Business Blogging 
2 Comments »
June 30, 2008
In our previous article RSS Feeds Explained, we discussed an overview of RSS and how an RSS feed can be helpful. Today we are going to apply it directly towards the fundamental reason why you are here.
How can an RSS feed help my business?
Link Building
While most aggregators use the “nofollow” tag preventing search engines from counting links, these are still links for users to find your content. Additionally, the more people who view your content the more likely it is that one of them will like it and either submit it to a social media site like digg or del.icio.us or simply post a link to it in their blog linking back to your website.
The first step in any good link building campaign is to let people know about your content that they can link to, so what better way to let them know about it than sending it to them via RSS!
Communicating With Customers and Partners
By enabling an RSS feed on your website your customers and partners can stay in touch with what’s happening in your business through your news updates. An RSS feed won’t replace your quarterly newsletter, or a personal phone call, but giving customers the option to subscribe to your news updates is a great solution for that intermediate communication.
Communicating With Media
If you have a regular stream of news updates such as press releases about new product launches, or other media-worthy news then you should absolutely be using RSS to allow media to subscribe to your news, as well as allowing search engines to index your press releases extremely quickly compared to letting the spiders find it on their own.
Keeping track of Competitors
Just as RSS feeds can help you keep in touch with your customers, partners, and the media, RSS can also help you keep track of your competitors without having to worry about visiting their website every day. By subscribing to a competitor’s RSS feed you’ll automatically be updated when there is news. This allows you to spend more time on what’s important – building your business!
Search Engine Optimization
By having an RSS feed of important news updates, new product launches, etc. that the search engines can digest you’ll be able to help the search engines better understand what your site is about, as well as when you have made an update. By doing creating an RSS feed you’ll absolutely be helping with your overall search engine optimization effort.
These are just five of the ways that having an RSS feed can help your business grow. What are some of your favorites?
Posted in rss feeds No Comments »
June 29, 2008
As you know, having a website or a blog simply isn’t enough. You must promote it, you must package your information the way your readers want, so they can digest it where they want, when they want. That’s why if you want to have a successful online marketing campaign, you must be aware of what RSS is and how an RSS Feed can help your business. We’ll cover how RSS can help your business in part two, but first lets explore with RSS.
What is an RSS Feed?
An RSS feed is a stream of information from your website or more commonly your blog that allows aggregators and search engines as well as subscribers to receive your information without actually having to visit your website!
Who Created RSS?
A variety of developers at Netscape created RSS starting in 1999 for use with the my.netscape.com web portal, but then abandoned it in 2001 after AOL’s takeover and restructuring of the company. However, by this time RSS had already sparked the interest of bloggers and other web publishers who needed a way to distribute information to news aggregators as well as to personal users who wanted a way to subscribe to web content without having to visit each site individually.
What does RSS Stand For?
The initial version of RSS created by Netscape stood for Rich Site Summary, but the version we use today (launched in September of 2002) stands for Really Simple Syndication.
How do I get an RSS Reader?
Virtually ever browser has an RSS reader now, as do most email clients. Also, most personal web portals including http://my.yahoo.com and http://www.google.com/ig
This allows you to subscribe to a blog or website and then check them all in one place.
How do I put an RSS feed on my website?
Virtually every blog supports a standard RSS feed, many other database driven content management systems also support RSS, such as Joomla and Drupal. This is one reason why we recommend that our web design clients use a system such as this, so the website can be easily connected to the rest of the Internet.
If you have a flash or pure HTML website, this is just another reason why you should start a blog, so you can connect your website without having to redo the entire site.
RSS Tools You Need to Use!
Feedburner
Feedburner allows you to organize your RSS feed so that it can be distributed in a very user friendly manner, including a variety of formats including by email! This allows your readers to receive your news in their inbox instead of having to worry about checking an RSS reader. Also, Feedburner has a whole host of features that let you monitor readership, ad advertising, ad buttons that connect it to social media sites, and of course it also automatically pings various blog search engines to let them know there is new content to index.
Technorati
Technorati is my favorite blog search engine and it is a great tool to simply browse and find out what’s hot. For you as the web publisher looking to monitor your website it is also a great way to find out who is talking about you!
Yahoo Site Explorer
Yahoo Site Explorer allows you to connect your RSS feed directly to the Yahoo Search Engine.
Google Blog Search Ping
By pinging Google’s Blog Search, you will automatically submit your RSS feed to Google, so that it will be found when someone searches for your information on blogsearch.google.com. Don’t worry, you can submit your corporate website news feed here as well, it doesn’t have to be a blog in the strict sense of the word.
twitterfeed
twitterfeed is an amazing tool that lets you broadcast your RSS feed to your twitter feed. I have multiple feeds - ManTripping. In this way, people that normally subscribe to Twitter for your quick updates can also receive a link to your blog posts or news updates from your RSS feed without you having to make an individual twitter post.
Posted in rss feeds 1 Comment »
June 20, 2008
A few months ago I started did some keyword research, discovered a niche that was interesting, had potential, had high-paying keywords and thought I was going to get rich (no I am not going to share it!). At very least, I was hoping to get a few easy adsense dollars here and there to let me go to the movies and order a hotdog instead of having to sneak snacks inside hidden in my pocket or my wife’s purse.
What I learned was that if you don’t have the passion then the posts just won’t follow.
So, I switched gears from my high-paying adwords keyword site to focus on developing a travel blog for guys, discussing mancation ideas etc. That blog, only a couple months old, is slowly growing and is averaging a 100 visitors a day, though it was averaging 200+ and peaked about at over 1,000 daily visitors because of a single article about an event that has since ended. Is it paying the bills? Nope, not yet, but during the weeks before the event when I had 1,000 people visit my site every day it did show the promise that if you combine a good article with a good topic that advertisers want to advertise on and visitors want to learn about then you can absolutely make money and lots of it.
This is an important lesson that most new bloggers don’t understand.
It isn’t enough to want to make money, you have to have something worthwile to write about that you are passionate about - that isn’t guarnteed to bring you money from adwords or affiliate programs, but it may bring other rewards, including new clients, free stuff to review, or the satisfaction that people find what you are writing about worth reading.
Posted in Adsense Blogging No Comments »
June 15, 2008
As we have discussed in previous seminars, it isn’t enough to simply create a website or start a blog, you need to promote it, and you need to have it available for people to find in the search engines. Luckily, building backlinks that point to your website helps with both of these efforts.
The problem with getting high quality, one-way links is that you often can’t control the source page, and therefore you can’t control what anchor text is used, or what page on your site it might point to. By creating your own external content with social media marketing, you can improve the odds that the links fit your content, as well as organically raise the value of your brand in the eyes of potential consumers.
The two best ways to generate high quality links are posting guest articles on other blogs and Syndicating Articles. In reality, these two are the same, but with a guest article on a blog, you are giving the blog owner exclusive rights to use your content, where as with most article syndication networks it is available for anyone to post and you don’t have control over where it will appear.
Five rules to follow when creating social media content:
- Answer a question, or solve a problem.
- Have a specific keyword phrase in mind that you want to target. Use that in the title, and throughout the body of the article.
- Make your title attention grabbing
- Article length should be no less than 300 words, and no more than 1000. If it is a longer topic, you should break it up into multiple articles or posts with each having a unique keyword phrase target.
- Limit the number of links to your website / blog to one or two. One link should contain anchor text that is related to your keyword phrase target i.e. search engine optimization, and one link should feature the URL of your website. i.e. http://www.marketinghelpnet.com This is so that the reader clicks where you want them to, and by having your URL as a link it ensures that they don’t miss it because it is hidden behind anchor text.
Beyond blogs and syndicated articles there are other places where you can create content that will pass link value back to your website or blog, as well as generating organic traffic flow.
Squidoo
Google apparently loves Squidoo lenses, and especially well constructed ones that are ranked well. The concept of a Squidoo lens is simple – pick a topic and then aggregate content so that the lense becomes an authority on the subject. For a travel company, this might be a series of lenses about different destinations, with photos pulled from flickr, books about the destination from amazon.com, a brief description written by you, and various links to websites related to the topic.
HubPages
HubPages is newer, but offers a tremendous amount of potential as an alternative to article syndication since the content only appears on hubpages.com, but it can be voted on by the community, people can comment on the “pages” and each page is ranked by HubPages for its quality.
Wiki How
If you have a topic that is a good “how to” type article, Wiki How is a great site to post it.
Yahoo Answers
Yahoo Answers features thousands of people around the world are looking for answers on topics ranging from restaurants to public relations tips. This is your chance to be a hero and simultaneously build your brand, as well as build links to your website. Saddly though, Yahoo Answers uses the “nofollow” tag which tells search engines not to treat it like a link, but it can still drive normal traffic to your site.
Promoting your Social Media Content:
Once you have created your social media content, you will need to promote it, so that ideally it generates both traffic, as well as long-term appeal and potentially gains some value to the search engines. Unless people make comments, vote positively, share it with others, or other positive interaction, there is no real value to your link. Luckily, if you follow the five rules above, your content should find a good place in the search engines and also the social media world and produce on-going dividens for your site for weeks and months to come.
To help the process of attracting people to your newly created content there are several tools you should employ to do make your social media content more valuable and turn plain old links into high quality backlinks that will benefit your blog or business website. These are only a handful, you will probably find industry specific sites as well as these general purpose ones.
- StumbleUpon
- Digg
- Sphinn
- Kirtsy (formerly Sk*rt)
All of these sites have communities of people that are constantly looking for new and interesting web content and often are decision makers and trend setters since they also run their own blogs as well.
Posted in Link Building No Comments »
June 13, 2008
Thanks to all the business owners who continue to help make these sessions a great success!
Our next topic will help business owners better understand what RSS is and how they can use it to promote their website or blog.
- Date: Monday, June 30
- Time: 7:30-8:30 a.m.
- Location: 40 DuPage, Ct. Suite 410, Elgin, IL, 60120
RSS and how to use it is a topic that seems to be quite a mystery to most business owners (and people in general), but it is quickly becoming an essential part of promoting your website, just as it already is for promoting blogs. During this session, (and accompanying articles online) I’ll work to explain how you can use it to promote your website or blog by connecting it to search engines, customers, blogs, and even other websites.
This is a continuation of the FREE internet marketing seminar series presented by mhn Internet Marketing Communications and GrowTogether.net
Each session is designed to help business owners better understand various aspects of Internet Marketing Communications, including Blogging, Social Media, Public Relations, Web Design, and other topics suggested by attendees.
This session is presented by James Hills of mhn Internet Marketing Communications and will last 25-30 min, followed by an open question and answer session.
While this session is held in Elgin, Illinois and is mostly designed for Business owners in Chicago, all interested parties are invited to attend, or follow along online.
Guests are invited to submit their questions before the session and they will be answered online at: http://www.GrowTogether.net as well as during the seminar session. Additionally, if you are unable to attend, notes from each session will be posted on the blog as well.
For more information about this event and future sessions, please visit:
http://www.growtogether.net/internet-marketing-seminars
Posted in Marketing Seminars No Comments »
June 13, 2008
I came across this link building presentation from SEOmoz.com this morning while doing some research on link building for our presentation on Monday.
While the speaker was mostly speaking from the point of view of larger, corporate clients most of the techniques he outlined are also applicable to smaller clients as well. This is especially true for the “white hat” techniques.
White Hat Link Building Techniques:
- Widgets
- Social Media
- Article Syndication
- PR / Press Releases
- Web Badges
These are link building techniques that google / other search engines would perceive as “ok” and will not harm your site by doing things improperly. Luckily for us and most small and mid-sized brands, these techniques are also very accessible and with a solid plan of attack can be implemented with pretty good success. The main thing to consider in all of these techniques is that the search engines view these link building methods as “positive” in that they are actual votes for the site by a third party.
The other two categories of link building techniques are considered “gray hat” and “black hat” because they are a little tricky, and can be considered deceiving by the search engines.
Grey Hat Link Building Techniques:
- Un-Related Widgets (widgets that don’t pertain to what they do i.e. a stat counter that advertises for a poker site)
- Affiliate Links
- Discount Offer Links
- “Hoax” link bait
These techniques are mostly dangerous because they will either cause problems with the way search engines index things - for instance many affiliate link programs inadvertently cause duplicate content problems because they produce hundreds or thousands of URLs with the same content - only the link is slightly different i.e. offerid=12345 at the end. Discount links can be considered a problem because some search engines - specifically google perceives them as being similar in goal to paid links. With hoaxes, google may remove the link value if it is brought to its attention, but probably won’t cause problems.
Black Hat Link Building Techniques:
- Paid Links
- Un-Related Widgets and Tools with Hidden Links
- Automated Links
These are areas that will absolutely get you in trouble, especially with Google because they are not “editorial” in principle because they either involve a financial transaction to secure a link, or the widget developer has hidden links that serve no other purpose than to trick the search engines.
Posted in Link Building No Comments »
June 5, 2008
The topic for our next free marketing seminar will be “How do I build High Quality Links to my Site with Social Media?”
This is one of the most important aspects of Internet Marketing Communications. If done properly, it will both build strong external, one-way, links pointing to your website. Plus, since you are creating the content you have almost complete control over how the links are designed and also how the anchor text, keywords, etc. is structured.
In addition to discussing why one-way links are important, the seminar will discuss various ways you can start building external content including: HubPages, Squidoo Lenses, Article Syndication, Blogging, and of course Commenting on Blogs.
This seminar will be held at 7:30 a.m. on Monday, June 16. Like all of our seminars, this one will be held in the office of mhn Internet Marketing Communications: 40 DuPage Ct. Suite 410, Elgin, IL, 60120.
Please RSVP by calling: 630-233-8336, emailing: jamesh@marketinghelpnet.com, or posting a comment or question below …
Posted in Marketing Seminars No Comments »
June 5, 2008
Thanks to all of you who were able to attend our Blogging for Business Seminar in Elgin earlier this week.
One of the topics discussed was what blogs the various guests enjoyed reading, so I wanted to share the list with you. Not all of these blogs are “business blogs” but it should give a good idea for things to look at as you start to think about creating your own blog …
ProBlogger: http://www.problogger.net
Shankman.com: http://shankman.com
Entrepreneur’s Journey: http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com
Gapers Block: http://www.gapersblock.com
design caffeinated: http://falcoarchitects.wordpress.com
Man Tripping: http://www.mantripping.com
Chick Vacations: http://www.chickvacations.com
A Good Husband: http://www.agoodhusband.net
Art of Manliness: http://www.artofmanliness.com
Community Blogs: These are blogs where it is actually a collection of bloggers on a single topic. These blogs are ideal for the casual blogger who might only update their blog once a month or once a week because people subscribe to the feed and visit the main site, not the individual blogs as much. As a result, you get exposure
Active Rain: http://www.activerain.com
Social Media Today: http://www.socialmediatoday.com
Hopefully this list of blogs will give you an idea of how to structure content and what to write about for your blogs. As always, if you have a question just let me know and I’ll be happy to help you out.
Don’t forget, our next free marketing seminar will be held Monday, June 16, 7:30 a.m. at 40 DuPage Ct. Suite 410 in Elgin, IL. To RSVP, please call: 630-233-8336 or email: jamesh@marketinghelpnet.com
Posted in Business Blogging 1 Comment »
June 1, 2008
Part 3 of mhn Internet Marketing Communications free seminar held June 2 in Elgin, Illinois.
Part 1: Introduction to Business Blogging
Part 2: Business Blogging Success Stories
Part 3: Getting Started with a Business Blog
Getting Started with Your First Business Blog
Now is the fun part! You have probably already decided that you want to create a blog. Now you need to figure out what the topic is going to be and how it will benefit your businesses.
Step 1: Pick a Blog Topic
Your business blog topic could be something as simple as highlighting new products that your store carries, or it could be more complex – such as this blog where I share pieces of knowledge so clients and prospective clients can better understand what we do. Ideally, your topic should have cohesion and be narrow enough to build a following. For instance – if you are a travel agent, don’t write about “travel” pick a topic that is narrow enough that it speaks to a specific topic – “honeymoon cruises” or “ski vacations”.
Another idea is to start a blog to help customers out. This could be an auto-maintenance blog for a mechanic shop – ultimately people aren’t going to do their own oil or replace struts, but you can provide tips about improving fuel economy, detecting when tires need to be replaced etc. If done properly, you are almost certain to bring customers in to use your services or buy your products before they thought they needed to.
This same theory would work exceptionally well for doctors, lawn care services, nurseries, arborists, and handymen.
Picking your blog subject is a major step and shouldn’t be taken lightly. If you need help figuring out a topic, we are always available to offer specific blog consulting services.
Step 2: Pick a Blog Engine
We recommend WordPress to most of our clients because the software is free and has an extensive user community developing new plugins and templates. There are two options here: self-hosted (on a webserver), where your blog name will look like: blog-name.com or as part of wordpress.com where your blog will look like: blog-name.wordpress.com.
Another excellent blog engine is Blogger (owned by Google) … it is much more simple than Wordpress, so it makes a great place to start your blogging journey but it is also more limited in what you can do with it.
An alternative solution would be to have someone manage the blog for you, so all you need to do is create content to upload – but other tasks such as keyword research, analytics tracking, maintaining security updates etc. are taken care of by a third party.
We offer this service, using WordPress as the base, or you can go with another service like Compendium Blogware that has their own proprietary system that they license to clients to use for a set number of categories and users.
Step 3: Pick a Template or Blog Theme
There are tons of free template sites out there, or for just starting out, you can use the default Wordpress template until you figure out what your blog needs.
Some Free Wordpress Themes sites that you should check to start your search: http://themes.wordpress.net/ and http://www.wpthemesfree.com/
Step 4: Setup Your Blog Back-End
There are various steps that can be done to tweak the backend of your Wordpress template, but for the most part, once you install Wordpress – especially if you are just setting it up on wordpress.com it is ready to start posting. Setting up your wordpress blog is something we can help you with if you need specific help.
Unfortunately free software does suffer from this problem and is one of the reasons why services like
Step 5: Writing Blog Posts
This step is going to be something you are going to do a few times a week, or even on a daily basis if you feel comfortable doing so. We recommend that you pick a general frequency that works well for you and try to stick to that.
Remember, once you start writing, if you stop for a week or two, it looks like you went away and nothing is going on with your company.
Step 6: Monitoring Your Blog Traffic
Different blog engines have different systems for measuring blog traffic, so you should install a tool so you know where people are coming from and what they are looking for. Feed the blog content that you want more traffic from and you will be rewarded.
Step 7: Promoting Your Blog!
Search engines are going to find your blog, but it is always a good idea to go out and let people know about it too.
This could be as simple as printing “blog cards” and handing them to customers, or including your blog link in your email signature. It could also mean going to places like Yahoo Answers or other related blogs and answering questions or posting comments on topics that you are an expert on. Again, this will create links back to your blog as well as promote your blog in the eyes of the other blog’s readers.
Now that you have your blog up and running, you will need to keep repeating steps 5, 6, and 7 as well as learning more about advanced topics and other tools that you can use to connect your blog to the rest of the world. We can help you with if you need help.
Posted in Business Blogging, Marketing Seminars, Social Media Marketing 1 Comment »
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