Image Courtesy of internets_dairy of flickr

If you have a business in this modern age, it is assumed that you have a website. Websites are great ways for potential customers and current customers to check out your company without having to phone your helpline or come to your premises. People these days prefer to have the safety of the Internet when having dealings with business and other people; they can also take as long as they want when finding information. The moral of the story is that it is much easier for the customer. This article, however, is not going to punt the benefits of having a website to businesses. What it is going to do, is punt the benefits of having a blog.

If you still do not know what a blog is, this is a blog. Alternatively, visit my page of explanations of blogging  terminology for a crash-course introduction. On to the 5 reasons that your business should get a blog today!

The 5 Reasons

1. Information Exchange – Blogs are a great way to exchange information with people; and these people are your current and potential customers. It is inherent in the nature of the platform that information be easily accessible. Blogs are also indexed quicker and are indexed by special search engines designed just for blogs.
2. Information is 2-Way – Blogs, once again by their very nature, are designed to facilitate 2-way communication in the form of comments. Its very easy to leave a comment on a blog and have the webmaster get back to you – making it less intimidating to contact the business on their email address.
3. Blogs are more Intimate – Company websites tend to feel intimidating and scare off customers who are afraid to send you an email. On a blog, contacting the owner is as simple as dropping a comment. And yes, people ARE intimidated to contact companies through company websites.
4. It’s Easy – Setting up a blog and publishing an article every other day is much easier than setting up a website and writing articles for that website. It’s also easy for the customers to view everything you have to say and get information. This is because most web users are familiar with the format of blogs and are thus familiar with how to find information on your blog. Conversely, websites are generally all very different and users will take time to become familiar with your format. Valuable time which they may choose to spend on another company’s blog!
5. It’s much easier to get Exposure – Blogs are much better for SEO purposes and so your blog will show up on search engines better, for the keywords people input. Also, people link to blogs more readily because they have useful content on them (articles, blog posts) while website usually only have company information. People link to useful stuff more readily. Also, if you post informative articles relating to your business, people will find your blog article containing all that useful information and think to themselves, “Wow, these people know what they are talking about regarding their field of business. Let’s just do business with them!” Bingo, another customer.

So, if you’re interested in getting a blog for your business, don’t hesitate to order one from us! We can design a blog for you!

Related posts which may interest you:

• 5 Tips to Effective Networking in your Blogging Niche
• 3 Reasons You Should Use Article Marketing!

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Image Courtesy of D'Arcy Norman on flickr

As I said in my post yesterday about building back-links, networking within your blogging niche is very important. Networking is the act of making friends and connecting with people around you; most often it is a term used in business. One is said to network when they are friendly, make contacts with other businesses and maintain relationships with other business people.

What is the Point?

The point of networking in the blogging world is to make friends and contacts, share ideas and content. If you have someone in your niche with whom you network, then you have someone who is not unwilling to link to your articles when they write similar articles and who will tell their readers that you have something to say. Its always good to know your neighbours, and networking is just that. Networking is a 2-way street, you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours – if you want them to link to you, you have to link to them!

5 Tips to Good Networking

1. Commenting!- A very important method of networking. Commenting is a good way to tell the blogger that you are interested in what they say, and they will pick up on that. Everyone likes to feel that they have helped or that they have stimulated some thought through their posts; so commenting on a blog is a good way to make sure that you let them know you found them interesting. Who knows, they may start commenting on your blog and you can share your ideas in future articles and collaborate.
2. Keep it relative- If you want to network with bloggers, don’t start at the top! A-List Bloggers won’t want to link to you, because you provide no benefit to them by linking to them – you are a small fish and your link carries little clout. Find bloggers who are closer to your range – look for the number of comments, feed subscribers and months they have been blogging for.
3. Don’t be shy- If you want to network with other bloggers, you have to take initiative and be confident. Ask them to visit your blog and see if they can find anything of value to link to, and tell them that you will link to one of their post’s in return. People will appreciate the honesty and the opportunity to get a link!
4. Keep up-to-date- If you want to network in your blog, you are going to need to have up-to-date content. Other bloggers will only link to your stuff if it is relevant, so subscribe to lots and lots of blogs in your niche and soak up as much current information as possible. It will also make your writing more interesting because you can throw facts in that are current and up-to-date. You will look like you know what you are talking about.
5. Be Social – Interact with your other bloggers, using not just conventional methods like email, but also using social media. Its so easy to talk to someone on Twitter and to give them a mention. I’ll be social right now and link to Aaron Rockey’s post about Malicious Code in Wordpress Themes. No problem Aaron

As a blogger or even businessman, Networking is VERY important so make sure its on your mind at all times. And, I hope that you learnt something new reading this article!

Useful Resources

As per usual, I will provide my list of resources related to the topic of blog networking. Note – If you would like one of your articles on this list in the future, don’t hesitate to contact me! 

• Networking Tips for the Busy Designer – Whilst the post is aimed at graphic designers, it has a universal theme that can be applied to any career. Check it out.
• 5 Killer Blog Networking Tips – Different tips to the ones outlined in this post, but they are invaluable tips to take away.

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Links. The things that make the Internet grind onward! Links, not computers (what a silly notion ), keep the Internet going and as a blogger, links are pretty dam important to you and your blog’s livelihood. So it follows that you are going to need to know how to get some links to your blog – because that’s what the search engines care about!

The 5 Steps to Linkbuilding the Right Way

1. YOUR Content needs to improve - The only real, surefire way of getting links and traffic is to write some good content. As the contemporary adage goes – “Content is King”. This is so true with blogging. The average blog reader only spends approximately 96 seconds at your blog, that’s 96 seconds to make a first impression they like. You’re going to need something that will keep them coming back every few days to see what’s up. Well, the only reason they came to your blog was to view your content, so make it decent. Even if you aren’t gifted with a good turn of phrase, make sure things like spelling errors and walls of text aren’t there.
2. Be Active in your Niche - Go and look for all the other bloggers in your niche and interact with them! Network, make friends and follow them on Twitter; its always a good thing to know your neighbours because they won’t be shy about linking to you when they are writing an article which your blog is obviously related to (you’re in the same niche). There are so many ways to network with fellow bloggers, but I’d rather not lose focus so I’ll mention 1 – comment! People love it when you comment on their posts .
3. Use Social Media- If you advertise your blog posts on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, people will be exposed to your content and will link to it if they think it interesting. So that relies on step 1, your content has to be good.
4. Write Articles for Article Directories – As in my previous post on Article Marketing, if you make use of Article Directories, the value you gain is more than just a link back – you can be considered an authority if your content isn’t rubbish. If you are considered an authority, people will be willing to link directly to your blog.
5. Keep at it…then Repeat Steps 1-4 - I know this sounds like a lame step, but its so true. Too often do people give up on their blog after a few weeks because they have so little traffic. The thing with traffic is, once it starts growing, it is exponential! Everyone needs to start somewhere and if everyone gave up on their blog because of no traffic, there would be very few blogs around at the moment. Successful blogs take time; you need to keep at it!

In conclusion, I hope that you have learnt something from this article and will attempt to keep going with whatever blog you are busy publishing to. Remember the reason you started it – keep that in mind when thinking of giving up.

Useful Resources

As per usual, here is my list of useful resources. If you want your blog post to be on this list in any future article, contact me! I’d be glad to include you.

• 102 Ways to Make your Site a Back-Link Superstar - A mammoth list on getting backlinks. You should bookmark it as well! Only one link necessary with a list THAT long.

Related posts which may interest you:

• 3 Reasons You Should Use Article Marketing!
• Starting out – Social Media and their Importance

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Article Marketing is just what you would imagine it is. Its marketing…using articles! The idea behind article marketing is to give yourself credibility in a specific area. Bloggers do it by submitting an article that they have written to an article directory where it will be displayed. An example of one of these Article Directories is EZine Articles which you should have come across at some point. Often, the directories will allow you to put a one-liner describing who you are. You’ll also get a free link back to your site. The reason that these directories even exist is because the articles you write provide value to readers for nothing; and if you’ve ever been to an article directory (chances are you have) then you would have seen the adverts plastered all over the site.

3 Reasons you should use Article Marketing

1. Free exposure - The only thing this will cost you is your time and effort.
2. High quality link back – Most of the time the link back that you get from these article directories has a lot of clout, and as you might know, this means that the link is worth a lot to you.
3. You become an authority – If the content that you submit is of a high quality, and you do it enough, you can come to be considered somewhat of an authority on the subject and people will definitely visit your blog and listen to what you have to say!

I hope you’re convinced, because Article Marketing is quite big at the moment and taking advantage of it would be to your benefit. Its not as easy as it sounds…beware! Not only are there thousands of other bloggers with the same idea as you, but there are also quality checks and article reviewers; so you are going to have to submit your best quality stuff!

Useful Resources

As usual, here is a list of useful resources in the area of article marketing:

• Article Marketing 101 - A useful introduction to Article Marketing.
• EZineArticles – As I said earlier, one of the biggest article directories. Quality only! 
• Why You Should Use Article Marketing – Another useful article!

If you would like me to include YOUR article in my list of useful resources in the future, contact me.

Related posts which may interest you:

• SEO and your Blog
• Starting out – Social Media and their Importance

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Top 3 Search engines and their slice of the search market.

As a blogger, you should be considering SEO (Search Engine Optimization) at all times! If you have come this far and still don’t know what SEO is, then you’ll probably benefit from my page with some explanations, here. For everyone else, let’s continue down the road! The article will start with a checklist that every blogger should be able to complete, then an explanation of SEO, followed by some useful resources.

SEO Checklist

• Have you optimised the content of your <title> tags? The title tags are what show up in search results so make sure that you are making them as Search Engine Friendly as possible.
• Are you making custom meta descriptions of your posts? Whilst meta descriptions definitely aren’t as important to Google as they once were, they are still important to readers and visitors. Meta Descriptions are the short descriptions underneath a link in a Search Engine Results Page (SERP), so make sure that they ‘hook’ the reader and are as compelling as possible.
• Is your blog description decent? Make sure that the description of your blog is succinct and attractive to the potential reader.
• Have you ensured that your site uses permalinks? WordPress, by default, generates ugly links to your posts (blog.com/?id=3); by enabling permalinks, your posts are a lot more Search Engine Friendly and better for users.
• Have you pimped out your Twitter Profile? There are a number of ways to ensure that your Twitter profile, which you should be using to drive traffic to your blog, is SEO friendly. There is a great article here which should help on this matter.
• Are you making use of internal linking? If there is something which you are writing about and it connects to an article that you wrote previously, then link to it in your blog. Google will also index your site better.

Of course, a lot of the technical SEO stuff is difficult to maintain and edit with CMS’s like WordPress, so it is best to download useful plugins to help do it for you! Personally, I use SEO Ultimate Plugin to give me the power to edit the titles and meta descriptions; don’t worry it is free (like most WordPress plugins) and is very useful. It also comes with a nifty module called the Deeplink Juggernaut which will search for keywords in your posts, and turn them into links to other articles on your blog related to that keyword!

Why SEO is important

If you read through that first part wondering why on earth there is such a big fuss over SEO, then keep reading!

Every blog seeks to have viewers. However, no matter what niche you think of blogging in, there is going to be someone who is already blogging in that niche. This is because people want money, and viewers = money. So if you want to be a cut above the rest, you’ll need to expose yourself. We’ll use a blog about photography as an example. Without any sort of SEO, typing the term ‘Photography tips’ into Google would make your blog on photography show up on probably the 10th SERP. Can you see how this is a barrier to the exposure of your site?

What SEO does, is make sure that the search engines find your blog to be very relevant to photography, and thus display it as among the top 10 most relevant blogs for photography tips. The search engines find your site relevant because in all your links, there is the word ”Photography”; or in all the meta tags on your site, it says “Photography tips”. Another thing which will help you is if there are links on other blogs/websites with the anchor text “Photography” or something contextually similar - and these websites link back to your blog. An example of anchor text is - Blog Design Company. That link would count a lot toward my PageRank if it were on another blog.

Of course, now that your blog is optimized and it shows up on the top SERP for “Photography Tips”, you will get some serious traffic! Try imagining how many people are searching for tips on photography every day and you’ll have a pretty good idea how valuable the top SERP is.

Useful Resources

Here is a list of useful resources regarding SEO. These should give you even more ideas on how to optimize your site for the almighty search engine.

• Webmaster and SEO Resources – A site offering some useful tips in the world of SEO.
• How to SEO your site for Google – An article focusing specifically on optimizing for Google.
• How to screw up the SEO on your site – A good article telling you how website did things wrong and what they should do to improve.

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Personally I’m surprised and slightly shocked that there were obviously people who were adding more than that each day! The move comes in response to “follow spammers” who follow thousands of users indiscriminately in the hopes of getting a follow-back. This reminds one of the story of a blogger who, in the early days of twitter, followed thousands upon thousands of users, got thousands who followed back and then unfollowed lots of users, changed his name and looked legitimate.

However, nowadays there are twitter blacklist sites which list “follow spammers” and warn you against adding them.

The question many bloggers are asking is What’s wrong with it? What is so wrong about adding thousands and thousands of users? If you can get a large following and get your message out there to as many people, what’s the problem. My personal feeling on the matter is that there is no problem with it, do what you can. However, I just don’t have the time to add thousands of people a day and I will rather choose to grow my profile slowly and steadily.

How do you feel about it? Post your comments below and…of course…you can follow me on Twitter- Blogoid.  :)

Related posts which may interest you:

• Starting out – Social Media and their Importance

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The Twitter Logo

Every blogger knows the importance of networking. In fact, every businessman knows the importance of networking! Well, in the Web 2.0 age of blogging and tagging; making contacts and getting your voice out there counts a whole lot.

Turns out that within minutes of hitting frontpage, the whole server crashed from the huge load of traffic. I immediately called Godaddy to hound them on the issue. Turns out they had to take the site offline because of the huge influx of traffic, which bogged down the server as well as other sites hosted on it.

Twitter

Twitter is a website that allows users to post short messages (Tweets) for everyone to see. You can “follow” a Twitter user and this results in you seeing all their tweets on your home page on twitter. Since its inception, Twitter has exploded in popularity and, whilst nobody can really explain why they do it, people get addicted to it. If you look on the right of this blog, you’ll see a WordPress widget that displays Blogoid’s latest Tweets. You can sign up to Twitter here, and why not “follow” Blogoid while you’re at it.

The Twitter website gives some tips for businesses on using Twitter. The information is invaluable to the new Twitter user who wishes to promote their blog using Twitter. Click here for Twitter’s Guide.

Sign up!

So the real message here is to sign up to as many popular Social Media sites as you feel comfortable with. It will really help get your blog some exposure and some much needed linklove! Once you have signed up, start making some genuine contacts and they will visit your blog. Don’t make the mistake most people make, which is to add as many people as possible as contacts. People in general find this behaviour rude and you’ll give yourself a bad name.

Related posts which may interest you:

• Twitter’s new “Quota” on follows

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