Blogging
Link Love: The Busy Blogger’s Friend
A combination of commitments to clients, demands of my political blog, freelance writing projects, and 20th high school reunion (!) festivities has resulted in the temporary neglect of this business blog, so I’ll do what busy bloggers often do: link to other blogs. Enjoy!
- Bloggers Blog discusses the blogging for money bubble.
- Can you avoid the blog bash?
- Visit Business Opportunities Weblog and Entrepreneur’s Journey, two of my favorite business blogs.
- Lee Hopkins asks if multi-tasking reduces productivity.
- Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion has started The Skin Cancer Blog.
- I can’t wait to read Naked Conversations, a business blogging book written by this blogger.
- A business blogger gets sued by a bad business. Bad.
- A business blog consultant loves his business. Good.
- A rich entrepreneur with a blog network is set to make even more money.
- News Flash: Teens are blog savvy!
- Toby Bloomberg links to advice for new bloggers.
Blog, moblog, permalink, RSS — confusing? Read this quick reference guide/article. It’s helpful for the non-blogger or newbie.
The one issue many bloggers obsess over and most at least think about often is traffic. If you’ve managed to build up an audience of more than a handful of people, you’ve noticed a sharp drop-off in site visitors on weekends. This can be very disconcerting, especially for the business blogger.
Wayne Hurlbert of Blog Business World offers a few tips to retain weekend readership.
Some form of traffic builder, or at least some form of weekend visitor retention concept, needs to be implemented if weekend visitors are important to you. The visitor traffic can be at east partially maintained in many creative and innovative ways.
A contest may require an answer on a Saturday or Sunday quiz, contest, or similar device. To win the contest, the reader might have to make a weekend visit. The post might contain a secret word that might be removed at midnight on Sunday. Perhaps the prize could only be claimed on a Saturday or a Sunday. The weekend blog perusal could be done either live, or via an RSS reader. The point is to maintain, and even add on additional regular readers for your blog.
That is the question, and my answer is, “Blog!”
To download a free white paper titled “To Blog or Not to Blog,” visit The Content Factor.
Although we may have different blogging philosophies, bloggers usually agree on a few general guidelines. PR guy Piaras Kelly has written a post titled “Tips on writing content for your blog”:
1. Use catchy titles: As I subscribe to more and more webfeeds, I tend to flicks through content a lot faster. Short, catchy, tabloid-style titles grab potential readers attention and will ensure that your posts have a better chance of being read.
2. Be unique: One of my favourite blogs is Gaping Void. Hugh MacLeod’s cartoons are great and instantly grab my attention. Try to make some aspect of your blog unique. for example, I now open each post with a quote which tends to reflect the entry.
3. Make sure to credit your sources: Don’t plagerise! Never use someone else’s content without crediting them. You can refer to them in your entry and offer your own opinion on the story rather than be a copycat.
I agree. Read the rest.
Harsh, but funny.
In other news, Newsweek has implemented a blog-roundup feature on its front page (scroll down).
(Via Search Engine Journal)
I don’t know how I missed this, but Forbes wrote about “blog power” last month:
Blogs (short for Weblogs) started out mostly as personal Web journals. However, thanks to sites like Google’s Blogger, which allows people to easily create blogs in a matter of minutes, these homespun Internet outposts are rapidly expanding and evolving. At this writing, there are some 14 million blogs, growing at a rate of 12,000 a day. Cumulatively, bloggers post content about 275,000 times per day on nearly every topic or niche imaginable. One study claims that more than 50 million people regularly read blogs.
It’s an excellent read.
Related post: Forbes on Blogs
Says the Sun-Sentinel:
[B]usiness is going to the blogs. Major corporations like General Motors and small businesses like Zenful Creations, a Web design firm in Coral Springs, have jumped on the blog bandwagon.
Blogs aren’t going away. The question is, is it something you want for you or your business?
[…]
By putting some effort and time into a blog, you can raise your business’ profile on the Internet and bolster sales. For instance, Leach estimates that about 40 percent of her business has come from people who first visited her blog.
So little to lose and so much to gain.
Blog consultant Wayne Hurlbert analogizes blog consulting with religious evangelism:
Whether the company is a traditional bricks and mortar business, an online business venture, or both, a business blog can pay huge dividends for any business bottom line.
The benefits are numerous, ranging from improved search engine rankings, to better customer relations, to more effective public relations, to ever more powerful marketing. Blogging succeeds in all of these areas. We all know those blog advantages to be true.
What we need to do now, is spread the word.
As bloggers, we need to become missionaries for the concept of business blogging. Some bloggers refer to those who spread the blogging gospel as blog evangelists. While I hesitate to consider the business blogs to be in the realm of religion or cults, I do understand the zeal for sharing the good news….If you have business associates and clients, you should be recommending that they add a business blog component to their online marketing efforts.
I tell business owners about the “power of the blog” every chance I get. Acquiring such a low-cost, effective marketing tool should be standard operating procedure for any business.
