If you’re like me then you really like to read top 10 (12, 15, 20 100 lists, especially if you’re on them. Well, recently, I found out that I’m on the top 12 small business marketing blogs along with several other high caliber small business marketing pros.
This is a great honor and I’ll tell you why. Just look at who else is on this list:
Jay Ehret at The Marketing Spot
Matt McGee
Search Engine Guide
John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing
Charlie Cook
VerticalResponse Marketing Blog
Small Business Trends
Becky McCray’s Small Biz Survival
AllBusiness.com
Rich Brooks
Small Business Brief
And did you notice who was at No. 1? It pays to be a Maverick.
If Facebook had a blogging feature, would you use it? I’m betting that you’d at least consider it and so is Chris Crum. In fact, Chris Crum makes one of the best recommendations that I’ve seen in a while.
In short order, Chris’s suggestion is for Facebook to change its Notes tab to a Blog tab and compete head on with Google in the blogosphere. That’s not a bad recommendation for several reasons:
Facebook is the second most visited site online (behind Google) so having a blog there would give Facebook bloggers a huge benefit and built in traffic.
Many Facebook users are not bloggers, but they might become bloggers if Facebook had that option available.
Many successful bloggers, seeing the benefit of having a blog on Facebook, would start a Facebook blog to supplement their current blogs.
Adding a blog feature would provide Facebook with more user-generated content and make Facebook itself more search friendly (even at Google).
Now I’m curious, if Facebook had a blog feature, would you use it? Would you do more to promote your business through Facebook’s blogging service?
Every now and then I read an article and think the author has it all together, then they make a recommendation that I think is just a little off the mark. This article at SiteProNews is one of those articles.
The author is right on target with the importance of relationship marketing in the 20th century. And she’s right on the mark with her recommendation of Facebook and LinkedIn as social media tools. The problem is when she talks about blogging. Her recommendation is to use one of the free blog hosts, but I don’t recommend that at all. Here’s why:
Your own domain name acts as a much better hub for your relationship marketing efforts.
A blog with a keyword-based URL is going to get you much better traffic than a blog hosted on Blogger or Wordpress.com.
Updating your own blog at your web address adds new content to your website every time you create a new blog post and each of those updates is a brand new page on your website, giving you many more chances to rank for your keywords in the search engines. Bottom line: Owning the property is better than renting it.
You can host conversations about your product, service and industry on your own web property.
By drawing people to your website or blog you will make it easier for them to see what you have to offer and make it more likely that they will make a purchase.
This is just the beginning. Relationship marketing is here and more powerful than ever. The Internet makes possible what has never been possible before for the average small business. Having your own blog is not as expensive as you might think and it’s one of the best marketing tools you’ll ever have.
Spammers have always had a bad rep with me. I’m not fond of them, and I’m guessing they may not be too fond of me. I usually don’t approve their comments.
I’ve recently stumbled upon a new spam technique that is perhaps the worst that I’ve ever seen. It’s bad enough that the spammer is trying to finagle a link by offering up a crappy comment that provides no value to my readers or to me. No, that’s not enough. This spammer has to provide a crappy comment in an attempt to finagle a cheap link by assuming someone else’s identity and “borrowing” (i.e. stealing) their avatar.
This is a new low. Even for spammers. And my question to you is, do you think this will start happening more often and should webmasters now be more concerned about reputation management as a result of this new spam technique?
My inbox has been buzzing with e-mails about the new FTC Guidelines pertaining to endorsements that go into effect on December 1st – specifically about how they pertain to bloggers. Lots of people have questions about what these new Guidelines mean and what changes they need to make to stay compliant.
As with anything new, there are a lot of questions – and lots of opportunists looking to scare the devil out of all of us (and offering their product as the solution, of course!)
A question that several of my clients have e-mailed me in the last couple of days is, “why are they targeting bloggers?”
While at first I thought that was the case too, the more I thought about it the more I realized that this is just the FTC acknowledging the power and credibility that bloggers and social media have from an advertising and business growth standpoint, and they’re now creating Guidelines that force us to comply with the same level of disclosure that professional journalists have had to contend with for some time. And while I don’t like “more rules” I am thrilled to see bloggers and social media professionals being given the credibility and respect that we deserve!
I’m no expert on the Guidelines, however, so I thought I would go “straight to the source” and visit the FTC’s website to see what the real deal is. Fortunately, they have some great resources that explain exactly what’s going on.
For instance, here is a great video from the FTC about what these Guidelines mean for bloggers:
For more information and to get all the details, here are the links on the FTC’s site where I found great info:
Finally, on Monday, November 23rd, my friend Marcy Nelson-Garrison is hosting a call with attorney Ken Kunkle of Kunkle Law Offices about these new rules and how to make sure we are compliant. Check it out!
Full Disclosure: I am NOT being compensated by the FTC or Marcy Nelson-Garrison for sharing this information with you. I’m just doing it because I found the info interesting and thought you’d like to know about it too.
I see small business owners from time to time who publish a blog post and decide they don’t want that blog post on their blog and delete it. Are you aware of the perception that is leaving about your blog when you do that? Every time it happens you create a new 404 page. Delete several dozen or a couple hundred blog posts over the course of a year or so and you could have a serious reputation problem.
A 404 error page is the page that is returned when someone clicks a link to a page that no longer exists. The web browser goes looking for that page and since it isn’t there, the browser can’t find it. In lieu of the page, the browser searches for a 404 error page and delivers that instead.
Why would this happen when you delete a blog post? Because the blog post has already been published and when you publish a blog post there are several things that happen. First, your blog platform sends out a ping to several ping services letting them know the blog has been updated. Each of those pings is a link back to your blog. Your RSS feed delivers the blog post to all subscribers. The search engines crawl your blog again and index the web page. Any directory that you have submitted your blog to lists your latest post.
As you can see, the blog post, once published, has been distributed. To delete it now would be like showing up at every subscriber’s house who has subscribed to your print magazine and destroying the print issue right in their hands. How many of those subscribers do you think are going to keep subscribing?
If you make a mistake on a blog post, a better solution is to strike through the error and correct it just like you would with a pencil on a piece of paper. Or, if you don’t want that blog post accessed by anyone any more, use your .htaccess file to redirect that page to another page on your blog. Don’t delete it, just redirect it. You’ll look more professional and have fewer frustrated readers.
WordPress comes out with a new update two or three times a year. Should you upgrade to the new version every time?
Most marketers would probably tell you yes. And I think it might be good to upgrade most of the time, but not necessary every time. Let me explain what I mean.
Just a little over a month ago WordPress introduced version 2.8.4. The version was intended to be a fix for security issues found in 2.8.3 and earlier versions and which hackers were exploiting left and right. It was a good time to upgrade so I did. Now, just a month later, they’ve come out with version 2.8.5, a “hardening release.”
So what exactly is a hardening release? More or less, it’s a release intended to heighten the security fix that was attempted on the last effort. In other words, WordPress put out a poor update so it’s time to “harden” it and do it right this time? How do we know this update is any better?
The problem with so many updates is I end up spending all my time updating instead of blogging. So should you upgrade every time a new version comes out? I think you should upgrade every time a new version is introduced – for example, when 2.9 is introduced then you should upgrade.
You should also upgrade as needed in between. Otherwise, don’t upgrade every single time. Only do it when it’s necessary and don’t wait too long because if you go too long without upgrading you’ll most certainly find yourself victim to a malicious hack.
If you’ve been wondering where we’ve been for the last month, let me explain. The blog was hacked and we had some difficult at first detecting it. That’s because the hackers didn’t mess with the face of the blog at all. They only jacked with our Admin area. As a result, whenever we’d log in to make a post we saw a bunch of gobbledygook and it became rather difficult to discern the problem.
After calling our web host, who was unable to tell us what the problem was except that it’s possible their server was messing up WordPress, we decided we’d move to a new host. However, before we could do that, I got sick and there was a long delay in getting the blog moved to a new host before I could get well.
As it was, I had my webmaster take a look at the blog and we discovered that it was indeed hacked, so we fixed it. We’ve decided not to change hosts after all.
But here’s the take away for you: Hackers are getting more sophisticated every day. Not only are they inserting Javascript and malicious code in places that are hard to detect, but they are doing so in such a way that if you find it and delete it then the malware returns in a day or so. Malicious!
Another way hackers are getting in to your website is through the Admin area and all they are doing is jacking with it so you can’t make your posts – not even messing with the face of the blog or the content. So be careful. Protect your blog with hard to detect passwords and be militant in deleting bad comments. It would behoove you also to every now and then go through your subscriber accounts and delete any that are not commenters. Hackers often subscribe to a blog as if planning to comment then use their accounts to gain access to your server folders and drop code in your files. They’ve even been known to change their own subscription accounts to admin accounts to maintain access over long periods of time.
Yes, while you improve your skills, the hackers are also improving theirs. Make sure you increase the difficulty of the delinquencies to succeed.
BTW, look for us to add backdated content to this blog to fill in the dates that we’ve missed – all the way back to September 24. We hope you’ll go back and read those posts as we write them.
It seemed unlikely ten years ago that a new kind of website would make it easy for small business owners to become self-publishers and usher in a technological revolution unlike anything ever seen since Gutenberg’s press. But that’s what happened. Now, we have Twitter. But Twitter hardly seems like a major innovation compared to blogging. Sure, it takes this new technology one step further, but I see it as more of an extension than a unique invention. That is, microblogging is an extension of blogging.
Look at the history of the printing press all the way back to Gutenberg and no innovation or improvement on the technology is as big as the initial technology itself. Gutenberg’s press made all the technological innovations to follow a necessity. It paved the way for mass communication, but once that path was paved it was all but inevitable. Not much really changed for over 500 years. Things only got better.
Are we about to see the same type of progress with online publishing? Or blogging?
Blogging is still a new concept. There’s room – lots of room – for improvement. But will the innovations to come simply be improvements on this new technology – similar to Twitter’s extension of the blog to a small micropublishing platform for bloggers – or will there be sweeping innovations that make blogging look like Gutenberg’s primitive movable type?
I don’t know. But I do know this. Blogging is here now. It’s here for at least a little while longer and while it is, small businesses should do everything they can totap into its awesome power.
Blogging is an interesting form of media. Most marketers will tell you that it is in the social media category. That’s true, it is. But it’s also in the SEO category, a place where many marketers are reluctant to place it.
The reason many marketers try to stay away from categorizing a blog as SEO is because they don’t want to give off the appearance or encourage search engine spam. That’s commendable. I don’t want to do that either. But the fact is, your blog, if done right, can be a great SEO tool.
To what extent is a blog an SEO tool? No. 1, it’s primary focus is on content. Content is SEO. Your website is SEO and your blog is SEO. Any content you produce is SEO.
But there are other reasons a blog can be considered SEO. It is also great for building links to any page you want to build links for and drive traffic to. And you can tag your blog with meta tags, keyword-based categories, and customary tags to make it easier for your visitors to find information they deem important. There are a ton of ways a blog can benefit you in SEO.
But it still has qualities of social media – interaction, trackbacking, widget enhanced, just to name a few.
If you really want to make the best of your company blog, use it as both an SEO and a social media tool.
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