Tag Archives: SEO

4 Top Benefits Of Blogging for Business

We are already on record as pointing out that if you want to raise your visibility and get in touch with your audience, it’s a good idea to blog.  It does take a little chunk of time out of your day, but it’s probably no more than you should spend on marketing, anyway.  Also,  I’ve seen many outstanding blogs….most notably by Guy Kawasaki… that are all photos and captions.  But then Kawasaki goes to really interesting places like a battle ship or Red Square.  And if he photographs something ordinary like a tech company office, you can rest assured it is no ordinary office but an incredibly creative, way out there, in a class of its own, office.

My point is, blogging can take as much or…almost… as little time as you want it to.  And if you aren’t doing it yet, perhaps you should take a look at the following:

Blogging for Business – Small Business Tips by One SEO Company has this to say about the basics of blogging and its benefit:

1) Blogs initiate dialog with web visitors

Blogs start a two-way traffic with web visitors. When you write about your products and services and write with authority, as though you are the master of your business and with in-depth knowledge about your products and services, you not only create awareness of the benefits and disadvantages about the product and service you deal in, you engage people’s attention. Your blog should also have a call to action, to make the readers of the blog interact with your website.

A call to action can mean asking them to leave comments, encouraging them to speak out. Comments left by the readers of blogs might include inquiries and leads that could lead to sales.

Blogs generate a prospective about your company. It silently speaks about the culture and vision of your company and even helps in building a brand image.

2) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Benefit of blogging

Blogs peppered with targeted keywords, keyword phrases and search terms related to your business puts blogs in plain sight whenever web visitors use related search terms. Instead of using long-tail keyword phrases, targeting niche keywords will help in attracting more qualified web traffic.

3) Blogs attract more links

Blog are meant to be informative and not advertisements. Informative quality, industry related articles that provide insight or a critical analysis of product and services you deal in helps you to get more links.

Links will get better search engine rankings for your website and will help in generating more traffic.

4) Fresh, original content for blogs

Fresh and original web content is the feed for search engine spiders. Websites that are updated frequently get crawled by the search engine spiders more often. Your website gets more authority and better search engine ranking.

By now, you should have enough reasons to being seriously considering blogging. For your interest and for the interest of getting more visitors to your website, blogging is the way to go. Don’t wait to begin blogging right away.

Start writing blogs, use targeted keywords and keyword phrases, generate qualified web traffic and get better search engine positioning and ranking. Fresh content and informative articles with SEO are best for search engine marketing.”

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Squidoo- A Great Business Model And A Good Way To Market

Seth_Godin,marketer extroidinaire, is the founder of Squidoo, which makes perfect sense because it is a very smart site.  More accurately, it’s a very smart business model.  One of the holy grails of the Net is to manage to get user generated content.   In other words, you, the owner, are not having to produce the content or pay someone else or a team of people to produce the content.  Your users do it for you.   And Squidoo is based on that model. (The other other holy grail is having a transaction site where something….. goods or money, possibly information, is exchanged between users and you just provide the platform, stand in the middle, and collect on every transaction.  Ebay is a transaction site.  So is Paypal.  They are a great thing to have if you can figure out how to build on and get people to come.  But that’s another post.)

But, even though Squidoo is a very good thing for Seth Godin, it can be a very good thing for you too, if you have something you want to publicize.  Squidoo is a very popular website with millions of visitor.  Think in terms of diverting a small percentage of that traffic to your website by building links into your lens. Which brings us to….

Why Build A Lens?

Seth Godin explains:

Squidoo is a website hosting hundreds of thousands of handbuilt webpages (just to be difficult, we call them “lenses”). Each lens is one person’s look at something online. Your take on football or business or the best thai food in town. (Jane Goodall has a lens about chimps–to spread the word about a cause she cares about. Martha Stewart‘s company built a lens about cookies–to drive traffic to their site.)

Lenses are free to set up.

Lenses are easy and totally non-techy.

Lenses pay a royalty to hundreds of great charities. (Or straight to you! Lots of lensmasters earn hundreds or thousands of dollars a year).

Lenses get you credibility and traffic… and lenses only take a few minutes to build.

Quick! All the reasons ( at a glance)

The people who hope to do well on Squidoo build hundreds of lenses.  Is this a good use of their time?  Well, that will be determined by the results.  It seems to me you would really have to build a lot of sites to generate much revenue.  But it does seem to be a piece of the puzzle as far as driving traffic to your blog or website. Squidoo lenses can be picked up by search engines. You can place links to your site on the lens and then the Squidoo traffic, or at least some of it,  clicks through to your site.  I’m going to give it a try and will report th resuts back in a later blog.

If you build a Squidoo lens, please write to us and share the results.  We’re all learning this together!

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How Do I Do This? Easy Blogging For Blog Newbies

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Ok.  We get it. After posting Shall We Talk? Easy Blogging For Blog Newbies, we learned a thing or two about your needs.  Although we know there are bloggers galore on every topic imaginable out there, there are also a number of you who are just stopped cold at the thought of starting a blog.  You might like to, but it seems too complex, too involved, too frustrating, too….whatever.

You’ve probably heard that saying: “To anyone whose only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” (Kind of like tunnel vision or having blinders on when it comes to others’ perspectives.)  To those of us who’ve already taken the high dive off the cliff and into the warm and welcoming waters of the blogosphere, the whole process seems rather user friendly and simple.  We perhaps forget where we started from.

I remember the first time I ever looked at a WordPress page, with no training and no preparation.  I thought “What on earth is this and how am I supposed to learn it”?  ( I think mild panic sets in at the first glance of the unknown, particularly when we know we’re supposed to do something with it…….like produce a published page, but how do your do that?)

I know Arthur, one of our blog readers, commented that he liked the post, Shall We Talk? Easy Blogging For Blog Newbies, and thought it was great to challenge women to make their own blog and create a community but regretted that the process was too complicated and long:

“I wonder if a step by step approach wouldn’t have been easier to follow…In a perfect world there will be some videos made from actions on both main platforms (Blogger and WordPress).”

Well, this post is an attempt to make the process easier for Arthur and all the hopeful bloggers, many of them women, for whom he speaks.  If any of you can add to this or enrich it with your own expertise or experience please do. For now, let’s see if we can break this down into bite size pieces:

1.  Free WP installation

There are sites out there which specialize in WordPress and will install and set up or transfer your WordPress site free.  One such site is SiteGround.com You have to get hosting with them at $5.95 a month. But you also get Free WordPress themes and WordPress tutorial. That sounds to me like a good way to get your feet wet.  They say they are the #1 WordPress Host, but there are probably others who offer the same services.

2. Gettting Started With WordPress tutorials

When you sit down, shake off that little twinge of “beginner’s anxiety”, and start to use it, WordPress has extremely intuitive administration: you will be able to compose a post and publish it on your website with just one click! The following are 2 different tutorials, both using screen shots, but the second is video, so also has a guide talking you through the process.

SiteGround.com offers an Easy Start tutorial with screen shots of every action telling you exactly where to go and what to click, step by step. It very clearly explains and shows a graphic of each of the following:

If you prefer to learn using video goto Ithemes.com Tutorials

NEW! WORDPRESS 2.6 BASICS

I was going to share with you how to start writing posts, the quickest and simplest way I know, again, just to get your feet wet.  But since I promised this would be in simple, bite size pieces, I’m going to save that for the next post : How Do I Do This Faster & Easier?  Easy Blogging For Blog Newbies

I hope this post has helped Arthur and all of you get started with your own blog.  Write and let me know how it’s going and what your experiences have been.  If there’s something specific you want to know, just tell me.  Our goal is to get you up on the Net, blogging your heart out, sharing all your stories with us.  Just remember: You make the path by walking on it.

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