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Posts Tagged ‘blog’
Monday, December 5th, 2011
Everywhere you turn, you can hear someone talking about a blog. Whether they are writing a blog or they are reading a blog, one thing is for sure. Blogs are wildly popular. And one more thing is certain – social networking is the most popular thing on the Internet. You might as well jump on the bandwagon and market your business this way.
Blogs are like websites, but you have social interaction with your viewers. Many blog sites are free and easy to use, too. Each time you post a blog, it looks as if it is an individual web page. This can make for a more dramatic look when viewed by your visitors.
Putting your business ideas into a blog will bring your business more potential customers and an audience who wants to see what you are discussing. Not only can you post your ideas in your own words, you can also have a shopping area where customers can view your products and make purchases.
One of the key things to remember is SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. If you focus your blog posts on the proper keywords and phrases, then you’ll increase your chances of obtaining high search engine rankings. For instance, if you sell gardening products and a prospect Googles “gardening,” if you have a lot of the right keywords (gardening, garden, etc.) in your blog posts, Google will favor your blog posts over those of your competition that are not well optimized.
If you aren’t sure where to start, contact Small Business Mavericks for a free consultation. We have a lot of experience and can get you off to a good start with your new business blog.
Tags: advertising, blog, blogging, content, google, internet marketing, keywords, online marketing, SEO, Social Media
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | 8 Comments »
Sunday, September 18th, 2011
People who don’t spend much time on the Internet will often ask me, “What is a blog?” It’s a hard question to answer.
Trying to answer that question for someone who doesn’t spent more than 5 hours online each week or month is like trying to explain the nature of the universe to someone who failed science in elementary school. You can do it if you use the right words, but you have to be careful to really use the right words and to make it really simple. I’m going to try to do that right now.
Take a look at the page you are on. You are reading a blog. It’s a separate section of my website. If you were on the main page of my blog you’d see a series of headlines, each one followed by some text. The headlines would be in blue and would be followed by a date and then the blog post. If you click on a headline, you’d be taken to that specific blog post. All you’d see is the content on that page and my sidebars.
So what makes a blog special. The way it is ordered. You’ll typically see 10 blog posts on the main page. They’ll be in reverse chronological order, the last one written first.
Blogs are done this way because they are like online journals. A sort of a diary. It’s a website, or a piece of a website, that you can update periodically and that others can read. For a business a blog can be great marketing tool. You’re reading mine, aren’t you?
Tags: blog, business, website
Posted in Blogging for Small Business | 4 Comments »
Monday, October 18th, 2010
Have you defined your social media marketing funnel? If not, you should.
Like your marketing funnel, your social media marketing funnel defines how you plan to channel your prospects into your sales cycle. The marketing funnel is your overall plan. It covers every aspect of your marketing strategy and how you plan to drive your prospects to the final sale. Your social media marketing funnel is a little more defined, dealing only with your social media marketing plan.
Like a real funnel, your marketing and social media marketing funnels should be wider at the top and narrower at the bottom. That is, you’ll have more prospects at the top of the funnel and fewer at the bottom while those true prospects who are ready to close on the sale right now filter through the funnel completely and into your sales cycle. Here’s an example of a social media marketing funnel at work.
- Social Bookmarking – Used to promote some of social networking and to draw in casual friends and fans to our social networking profiles.
- Facebook, Twitter and Linked – Social media networking profiles with interaction with followers and fans at a superficial level. Little real marketing takes place here. This is just to get the conversation going and develop initial relationships. From here we drive prospects to our blog.
- Forums – Like social networking, we’re driving prospects to our blog and interacting in a more superficial and less direct marketing way.
- Social Bookmarking – Unlike social networking, the object is not necessarily to drive people to the blog. It’s to promote our content, however, we want to drive traffic to our most important content on our blog and static website.
- Blog – With our blog we hope to get a little more intimate with our friends and fans. Here we get into more in-depth discussions about our company and products/services. We are developing deeper relationships with people and interacting on a more personal and professional level. We are not striving to close sales on the blog, although we hope it happens. Our real goal is to drive traffic to our most important sales pages and to get e-mail sign ups for our newsletter and e-mail marketing campaigns.
- E-mail - More personal and a deeper professional connection takes place in our e-mail marketing campaigns. Our subscribers get more special offers and deals than anyone else. In fact, we frequently have exclusive offers just for our e-mail prospects. We use e-mail marketing to drive traffic to our sales pages where we strive for high conversions.
Notice that at each level we are getting deeper personally and professionally. The real marketing takes place at the e-mail level. At the blog level we are marketing but the goal is to drive traffic to the sales pages where the closing takes place – and we want to get people to sign up for our e-mail list where they will really get the best deals. Everything above blogging is designed to drive people into the blog and deeper into our cove.
You probably noticed that social bookmarking is in this funnel twice. That’s because it really does serve more than one purpose. We are trying to get people to our blog and to our social networks, we are also promoting all of our content. It doesn’t really matter which door people walk through as long as they become a customer.
This is just an example of a social media marketing funnel. But I hope it illustrates the importance of your funnel. If you need help designing a social media road map, or funnel, then let us know.
Tags: blog, marketing, social bookmarking, social media marketing, social networking
Posted in Social Media | 12 Comments »
Friday, April 30th, 2010
If you do any business online, at some point you’re going to come across someone talking negatively about you or your company. Most of the time this negative publicity will come in the manner of anonymity. You won’t know who is attacking you or why and therefore have no way to redress the points in private. You’ll have to deal with it publicly.
That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to address the attacker’s points in any way. You most certainly should not engage him or her on websites that post his negative publicity. That will only help his cause, not yours.
If you find your adversary using third-party sites that offer a chance to respond to negative reviews then you may provide a short response – note, I said short – that attempts to invite others to discuss any issues with you in private. Don’t give ammunition to those who are against you. And you might also ask your good customers – the ones you know who will defend you – to counter with a positive review.
Beyond that, however, there are specific online tools that you can employ to wage a positive PR campaign that will combat negative publicity you find about you and your company.
Positive Reputation Management Tools You Can Use
I would recommend 5 primary online reputation management tools to help you defeat negative publicity about you online.
- A Network Of Blogs – Always start with your own properties. The more you own, the better off you are and the more secure your reputation is. One blog is good, but five blogs is better. Try to use blogs that use keywords associated with your negative publicity. You are trying to push the negative publicity pages down in the rankings. Blogs might take some time, but they can provide you with some ammunition to control the positive information flow about your company.
- Your Own Network Of Microsites – A tightly controlled group of microsites that target key phrases you want to defend can give you plenty of ammunition to combat negative propaganda about your company and defend your reputation.
- Press Releases – Press releases are good because you can submit them to third party sites. Often, those sites are authoritative websites that can get your well optimized press release some high exposure. Target the right keywords in your press release and you can gain a prominent position in the search engines for your keywords. Plus, you can drive traffic to your website.
- Social Networking – Use prominent social networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Use them often. Set up a profile in your name and a Facebook page in your company’s name. Be active in your social networks. The more active you are on the networks the more they will start to rise in the search engine rankings.
- Social Bookmarking – Social bookmarking is different than social networking. You are submitting your blog, social networking profiles and website pages to well trafficked sites like Digg and StumbleUpon. Sites with a high authority rating and lots of traffic will get you additional exposure and potential rankings. With many of these sites, the more positive reviews you get of your bookmarks the more chances they have of ranking well in the search engines.
You want to be careful not to spam the search engines, but you do want to defend your reputation with positive stories about you and your company. Use the tools effectively and you can win the battle over your reputation.
Tags: blog, Reputation Management, SEO, Social Media, website
Posted in Reputation Management | 2 Comments »
Monday, April 5th, 2010
As you know, I’m a big proponent of small business blogging. But ever since Google and Bing started indexing real time search results your blog has become more important than ever. Here’s why …
Not only are the search engines indexing tweets – and I think we all know that Twitter is getting the lion’s share of publicity about real time results – but other social media, including blogs, are being included in real time search results as well. There are two aspects to real time search.
- SERPs Pages – These appear on the first page of the SERP and represent the latest tweets, blog entries, Facebook updates and other social media content.
- Latest Results – Of course, the SERPs pages real time section is all about the latest results, but it also includes other search engine results like news, photos, videos, etc. And for the some searches there are no real time results on the SERP so if you want to see the latest results then you need to click on “Show Options” then on “Latest results”. This is where the latest tweets, blog entries and other social media results will appear in real time.
Of course, if someone is looking just for the latest blog results then after clicking on “Show Options” they can click on “Blogs” and only the blog results will appear, but that’s not a new development.
Thanks to real time search indexing, your blog is more important than ever. If you haven’t started one, now is the time.
Tags: blog, real-time search
Posted in Blogging for Small Business | 1 Comment »
Saturday, March 6th, 2010
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. 
Tags: blog, small business marketing
Posted in Blogging for Small Business | 1 Comment »
Monday, January 25th, 2010
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.
Tags: blog, domain name, relationship marketing, Social Media, website
Posted in Blogging for Small Business | 4 Comments »
Friday, June 26th, 2009
Security is very important for any Web business or website. If you have a blog that runs on an open source platform like WordPress, it’s even more important. Hackers tend to target open source systems to gain access and do bad things like drop spam files and so on.
If you want to stop spam from entering your comments area then you need to use Akismet, a WordPress plugin that stops 99.9% of the spam that tries to get through. But beyond that, you can make your WordPress blog more secure by using a password that makes it difficult to hack. If you use a simple password that is a dictionary word then you make yourself vulnerable to hacks and attacks. Make your password longer and more difficult to guess.
A good password should consist of numbers, letters, special chacters, and lower and upper case letters. A word like “wordpress” is not enough as that is easy to guess, particularly by a robot that runs through the dictionary automatically guessing passwords. If, instead, you added numbers and characters as well as upper case and lower case letters then you’d have a more secure password. For instance, “W3ord&p2rEss!4″ is a lot more secure and more difficult to guess. For every character that you add you make your password exponentially more difficult to crack.
Blog security begins with your password. Make it something that is easy for you to remember but difficult for hackers and robots to guess and you’ll be much more secure.
Tags: blog, hackers, passwords, security, wordpress
Posted in Blogging for Small Business | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009
Your permalink is the complete long URL that you use for the address of your individual blog posts. An example of a permalink is:
http://www.smallbusinessmavericks.com/internetmarketing/seo-for-small-business/can-a-sitemap-get-your-website-indexed/04/28/2009/
Let’s walk through it line item by line item:
- The domain name URL – This is simply your domain name. If your visitor is sitting on your home page, this is the URL that would show in her browser. In my case, that URL is http://www.smallbusinessmavericks.com/. It’s important to understand, however, that this address is the URL of my website, not the blog.
- Blog Address – If your blog is your website then it may sit on the root domain. That would be the above-mentioned URL for my home page. But if your blog is a part of a larger website then it will have its own folder and will look something like this: http://www.smallbusinessmavericks.com/internetmarketing/. internetmarketing is the name of the folder where my blog sits. Yours will be something similar, but you should name that folder something related to your niche and put an important keyword in it. This will help you with SEO.
Everything that follows from here pertains to the individual blog post. There are several ways you can go. First, you must decide whether you want to include the category name in your permalink. I have chosen to do that and you can see the category name in the permalink to the above blog post. It’s the part of the URL that reads seo-for-small-business/. The category name isn’t necessary, but it can further help identify to your readers the nature of your post.
After the category name (should you decide to use one), there are generally three other protocols in popular use:
- Date protocol
- Number of post protocol
- Post name protocol
It is generally accepted not to use all three protocols, but you can, technically. They can appear in any order, but I’d prefer to put my post name closer to the beginning to make good use of my keywords in the domain name. Analyzing the above URL, you’ll see can-a-sitemap-get-your-website-indexed/. That’s the name of the individual blog post. After that, the numbers represent the date of that blog post. The number of post protocol is generally a 3 or 4 digit number, like this: 231. That represents the 231st blog post you wrote on that blog.
Which of these protocols you use for your blog depends on factors that are important to you in perception and ranking with the search engines. However you do it, just know that you have options.
Tags: blog, domain name, permalink structure, url, website
Posted in website development | 3 Comments »
Saturday, October 18th, 2008
Business blogging is something that every business can benefit from but if you`re not saying something unique, your blog simply won`t live up to its potential. You see, people aren`t interested in reading the same information they can find on every other blog on your topic.
Offering something unique is the best way to make sure that your business blogging attracts and keeps readers interested. There are a few different ways to do this:
Offer unique insights. You may have a view of the industry that no one is covering.
Cover a completely new topic. It`s pretty hard to do, but if you can find an entirely new topic to blog about, it will definitely get the attention!
Have a unique voice. There are some blogs that are read just because they are entertaining. If you can be funny, go for it. Having a unique voice in the industry, funny or otherwise, will help you create a following.
Being different, standing out, is a good thing when it comes to business blogging. No one wants to read a dull blog that just rehashes the same old content all the time. Provide something unique and they`ll stick around to keep reading.
Tags: blog, business blogging, marketing
Posted in Blogging for Small Business | No Comments »
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