blogging

Online Branding Tip – Create a blog

Online Branding Tip – Create a blog

Often we speak with professionals that want to brand themselves online and create exposure and also establish themselves as an expert in their field.  There are several ways to do this but one we often suggest is starting a blog related to your industry or niche.

Starting a blog and sharing information about your industry can help brand you as an expert in your field and will help get your name out there.  We have seen blogs work for several in many different industries, even those that are restricted somewhat.

Here are some ideas of how you may be able to use blogs to help you brand yourself and create exposure:

Real Estate Agent

Create a Neighborhood blog and share information on a particular neighborhood.  This will help brand you as the neighborhood expert and go to person when it comes to learning information about that neighborhood.

Insurance Agent

Insurance Agents are restricted somewhat on what they can do online, however you can start a community blog to share information to the market you are targeting.  This information does not have to be related to insurance.  This will help establish you as a resource.  To help brand yourself you can include a short bio on who you are and links to your insurance site.

Direct Sales Professionals

We work with several people in the direct sales industry and blogs are a great way for them to brand themselves.  You can share information on how to build a direct sales business and grow your sales force.  We also have several in this industry focusing on health and wellness that have blogs that showcase what they do and also provide other health related information.

Travel Agents

Everyone loves to read about great places to visit for vacation.  Travel agents can start a blog that showcases great places to visit.  This will help drive traffic to them when people are looking for a specific vacation spot and who do you want to book your vacation with …. Someone that doesn’t seem to know the best spots or someone who shares information and reviews and tips about the hottest vacations spots.

 

Fitness Trainers

A blog is a great way for a health and fitness trainer to share information and provide a glimpse of their expertise.  A fitness trainer that provides information to people is seen as a great resource and often draws them to do business with them.

If you haven’t started a blog yet we highly encourage you to look into doing so to help build your reputation and establish yourself as an expert.

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How to Blog – Blogging 101

How to Blog – Blogging 101

Blogs or weblogs used to be mostly for personal use, like a journal or a diary only this one is online. These days however, blogs have also become a tool for many businesses. It has become a means to reach out to their present and potential clients especially since people are now technology-savvy, they prefer the convenience of searching and learning more about a certain business’s products and services within a few clicks.

Whether your company or your business is only starting up or has been ongoing for a while but with no online marketing strategy, a blog would be a great way to start introducing it to your target market and gaining clients.

But, how to blog? Is it as easy as getting just a blank piece of paper and writing down your article? Well, not necessarily. Knowing how to blog has a significant role  on how effective your blog would be and end-result that it can give you and your business.

Below is a list of things to keep in mind about how to start your blog:

1. Know your niche and stick to it – whether for personal or business use, research about your topic, and then sticking to your niche topics can bring you more traffic and more clients. If you’re business is about real estate, post real estate related topics, products, and services, if you are into food and beverage, anything related about food, beverage, restaurants, even health, can be included in your blog.

2. Choose your blog name, URL address, design and platform -  now that you have come to a decision on your topics — although this would be easy if you are blogging for business — it is now time to think of your blog name and URL, both usually your company’s name since it is the one you’re marketing. After all these, choosing where you want to place your blog is the next most important thing if you are just starting how to blog. There are a lot of blog platforms available today, both free and paid, that can accommodate personal and business blogging. Some of the most popular blogging websites are WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, and LiveJournal. Depending on your style, choose the ones that best suit your business’ needs, which one is easier to navigate, the design that is easy and not to heavy on the eyes, these may seem insignificant but it is as important as the contents if you are just learning how to blog.

3. Regularly post content – posting articles and content on your blog is the bread and butter of your blog site.  This is what people would be looking for when they visit your blog. Make sure that you post within your niche and you post regularly. If you can’t post daily, you can write several articles per day and just schedule each post to be published in the next days.

4. Publish and promote your blog – so, you are now starting to get the hang of how to blog, it’s time to broadcast it to the world and let everyone know about your business — your products and services. How? Start with your existing clients and friends, let them know that they can now be updated about your business through your blog, it is a good idea to send out  emails or newsletters. If you have social media accounts like Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, post your blog site there too, you can also post feeds of your articles to bookmarking sites like Digg and StumbleUpon to get your blog out there.

The 4 notes above are just the general things that can help you start a blog, once you have created your blog, you will have to work on your content, target, gain and maintain your traffic/visitors. So, knowing how to blog is just the beginning of your blogging experience, keeping it alive and getting traffic is an ongoing process.

 

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Your Guide For Blog Marketing

Blogs also known as web logs are the latest thing on the internet. With there being so many blogs out there on the internet, how do you make yours known and get people to read it. How do you have the most often read blog on the market that you are promoting? Because there are so many people that are trying to all accomplish the same thing, how are you going to stand out?

There are several things that you can do to make your blog marketing a success, and we are going to cover some of them right here. The first thing that you should know is that you should have  a domain name for your blog that identifies it with your target market or keywords.  For example, if you are trying to promote and sell sunglasses from your blog, you want your URL to say www.sunglasses.blogurl.com. Doing so will give you an extra advantage.

The next step would be to customize your blog. Rather than having the same old blog interface like everyone else has, make your unique and interesting to look at. This will also help anyone from getting your blog confused with others that look just like it.     There are so many types of blog software on the market that having your own look should not be that difficult to accomplish.

Keyword research is another very important part of blog marketing. If you are not using the keywords that people search on, then chances are no one is going to find your blog. Have a variety of keywords in your blog as well. Not just the same one over and over. Not everyone just uses the term ‘sunglasses’ when they are searching for shades to keep the sun out of their eyes. Keyword research is an important factor to remember.

Using SEO on your blog, which stands for search engine optimization is a great idea as well. SEO will help get your blog out there and read, and will also help you get a better ranking with Google. Being as high as you can be in the Google search engine results is something that you want.

Find other sites and blogs that are in the same market as yours, but not in direct competition with you to exchange links with. This will help you out a lot as well, especially if you can get some good exchanges with high authority sites. The higher the page rank of your link exchange, the better for your blog.

Many people do not realize this, but having a different title tag in the HTML code on each page makes a big difference. If you have given the first page on your blog the title of ‘sunglasses’, you need to be sure that none of your other pages are named this. Doing so will make Google think that you are spamming that keyword, and that will result in them punishing your blog URL.

Once you have done your keyword research, you will want to write content based on the research you have done. Using one or two keywords, make entries into your blog using the keywords will make it easy for your blog to be indexed under those terms. That will also result in people searching on those particular terms able to find your blog.

Pinging your blog frequently is another good way to get your blog seen. Every time that you update it, use the ping tools to ping it. This will let all of the blog directories know that you have added something new to your blog. This also brings you in some more traffic.

Blog marketing is pretty much the same as website marketing. However, if you have never had a website, and are not familiar with marketing these great tips will help you get started. Be sure that you put new entries into your blog on a regular basis as well. This will help keep you up to date and current and also will keep your readers coming back for more.       

If you would like to discuss a blog strategy for your business please complete the form below and a member of our staff will get back to you for a consultation.

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Tips for Keeping Your Blog Up to Date

Keeping a blog up to date is one of the most important aspects of blogging. This is so important because regular blog visitors expect new postings on a regular basis. Not all visitors expect to see a new post as often as once a day but most blog readers expect the content on the blog to be updated on a regular basis. In most cases visitors expect new content on at least a weekly basis. However, depending on the subject matter the visitors may expect updates on a basis which is either more frequent. Similarly visitors may not be interested in receiving this type of information more than a few times a year. Blog owners should be aware of the frequency of which readers expect new posts and should make an effort to oblige the readers with updates this often. This article will discuss methods for keeping a blog up to date including scheduling a regular time to post blogs, using publishing tools wisely and hiring guest bloggers when necessary.

Finding Time to Post Daily

One way to help to ensure a blog remains up to date is to schedule time to post blogs on a daily basis. This is especially important when blog readers expect new posts on a daily basis or at least several times per week. Bloggers who allot a specific block of time each day to researching, writing and publishing blogs are more likely to have a blog which is up to date than bloggers who plan on accomplishing tasks when they find time to do so. There may still be days in which the blogger is unable to publish a new post on the blog but these days will be less frequent than if the blogger does not have a block of time strictly dedicated to keeping the blog up to date.

On days in which the blog is unable to devote time to blogging, the blogger may wish to at least publish a short message explaining why it was not possible to post a new blog entry. This will let readers know you are aware of their desire to read more information but are simply unable to publish a new blog post. As long as this does not become a regular occurrence, blog visitors are not likely to stop viewing a blog simply because the blogger skips a day or two.

Taking Advantage of Publishing Tools

Some blog publishing tools enable bloggers to write blog posts ahead of time and specify when each post should be published. This is an excellent feature for bloggers who want to publish new posts daily but are unable to dedicate time each day to writing blog posts. This way the blogger can dedicate a block of time each week to write blog posts and have the posts published throughout the week. This is often an easier method for many bloggers because they are able to be more efficient this way.

Hiring Guest Bloggers

Bloggers may also want to consider hiring guest bloggers to assist them in keeping a blog up to date. This can be a worthwhile method for bloggers who are not only having difficulty keeping their blog up to date but are also interested in providing readers with a little variety. However, blog owners who opt for this message of keeping their blog up to date should carefully consider how the dedicated blog readers will react to this change. This is important because some readers may not be interested in reading blogs written by a guest blogger. Therefore the use of a guest blogger can actually be more detrimental to the blog than not updating the blog regularly. Bloggers can gauge reader reaction to the use of guest bloggers in a couple of different ways. The simplest and most straight forward method is to poll the readers about the use of guest bloggers. This can be done by asking readers to comment on the issue and tabulating the comments received. Another method to gauge reader reaction is to introduce a guest blogger and compare the traffic the guest blogger receives to the traffic the blog owner receives.

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Reasons Why Blogging Will Boost Your Business!

Reasons Why Blogging will Boost Your Business !

Building your business can be a difficult task. You can put hundreds of hours of effort into the business, but if you still don’t have important components, you will not be successful. Today business owners are realizing that blogging boosts business. Blogs are typically only seen as personal places to express yourself and your views. The truth is however the blogs are also great places to reach people about your business or your products. There are several ways to do this type of blogging.

The best way a business can use blogging to boost their business is by taking part in the blogs of others. You can easily create quality posts with your business in mind without needing to set up a blog of your own. Try finding blogs that pertain to the area of business you are in. This will help you get started. With millions of blogs out there, you should be able to find some with no problem. Choose to post on all of them, or choose the few that get the most activity. Then begin posting. When you do, you will see positive results come in. If you are still curious about how this can boost your business, check out these three reasons blogging boosts business.

Quick Name Recognition

The fastest way to get your business’s name out in the public is to make it known to your targeted marketing group. If you want to get your company’s name out to men who like fishing, then you can find a blog that is about just that. When you find the blogs pertaining to this marketing group, post useful and intelligent information about topics that pertain to your company. You might not want to sound like an advertisement. Think about responding to another comment and simply tagging your signature with your company’s website. This is a subtle way to get their attention. The more you post on blogs, the more widely known your company’s name will become with the select marketing group. When they tell their friends and family about the site then your consumer group will have grown even more. This is a fast way to get started. You will have to invest some time however. At least an hour a day can be used for this type of task.

Consumer Testimonies

Your company might even think about hiring professionals to blog for your company. You can offer these employees products to try and give them the task of finding blogs where they can appropriately “praise” the product. By paying these people to do the task, you will be getting the work done that you need without having to devote much time. Consumer testimonials go a long way with other consumers. If these bloggers are productive enough, you will see an increase due to it.

Building Relationships

Smart business owners know that they can go further with the help of others. A great way to connect and build relationships with other businesses is via their blog. If you are a regular poster who values their business, they will be more likely to work with you. Working together with advertising is a great idea. You can swap ad space for no fee if you like. These are great things for business owners and are easy to get into when you blog regularly.

As you can see, blogging can be a great way to do business. It may seem like tricky advertising, and it is in some ways. However, it is free advertising that does the same thing as a commercial on television does. It reaches a targeted marketing group and lets them know your company’s name, products, and sometimes offers an endorsement. Overall, it is an effective way to get your business out there. When people have no idea who you are, they are not going to feel comfortable working with you. The better your reputation is, the more likely they will trust you. When you have no reputation at all, they will not trust you either. So, even if you just want to use blogging to build your company’s reputation, it will be worth your while. Give it a try and see what type of results you can get using these tips.

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Blogging: Let’s Brainstorm for Content

Finding Content for your Blog

One important component of having and maintaining a blog is having content to write about or share.  If your blog is dormant and you never update it then your readers will not have a reason to come back on a regular basis.

This post is going to cover content and provide some ideas on how to have regular content for your blog.

One thing that you need to consider for your blog are topics that you are interested in and passionate about.  If you are able to focus your blog on topics that interest you it will be easier to create fresh content on a regular basis.

Often when you write your feelings and emotions will show through to your readers in your content.  When you right on topics that excite you and you have a strong interest in this will show through to your readers.  Your personality will also show and will help build connection with your readers.

Once you’ve chosen your main theme — or if it has chosen you, then that’s even better — start posting to your blog and try to get into the habit of doing that at least two to three times a week. It doesn’t always need to be a long post; it could be a comment on something you read in the newspaper today or a segment that you saw on the breakfast news program on TV.

Nevertheless, regardless of how well you know your topic, you’re going to run out of fresh input at some point, so let’s look at some content brainstorm ideas.

1) Check out what other bloggers have to say on the current state of affairs in your industry. You can find related blogs by visiting http://blogsearch.google.com/  or http://www.technorati.com. You’ll learn from other blogs and you can also comment on what others have to say on your own blog!

2) Once you’ve established contact with other bloggers, you’ll have almost inexhaustible input to keep you going for a while, so there won’t be an acute need to search for content to write about. Should you still be stuck, then you can search for news articles related to your niche in you local newspaper or online.

3) By joining a few forums related to your niche or industry — just choose the ones that are the most focused on your particular area — you can engage in conversations with others who share your interests. This is a great way to build up a Q&A bank and interesting discussion topics to write about. An added bonus is that your forum posts will quite handily generate traffic for your blog and, hopefully, profits.

Try to maintain your regular blogging schedule of at minimum two to three times a week. The major search engines love fresh content and they are more likely to spider your blog frequently, which will also result in getting you extra traffic.

The subject of traffic will be discussed in a future article, so don’t worry about that right now. Just keep writing and posting and building up that momentum — you’ll be an established blogger before you know it!

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