July 23, 2008
This is the next topic in our series of Free Internet Marketing seminars held at the mhn Internet Marketing and PR office in downtown Elgin, Illinois. Next Monday morning we’ll be discussing how business owners can improve their Internet Marketing efforts through participation in Professional Membership Organizations.
Specifically we’ll be looking at two organizations in Elgin, the Elgin Area Chamber and the Downtown Neighborhood Association, and the unique opportunities available through both organizations.
Time: 7:30 a.m.
Date: Monday, July 28, 2008
Location: 40 DuPage Ct. Suite 410, Elgin, IL
Posted in Marketing Seminars 
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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 1 Comment »
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 »
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