Pay Attention to Blogging

In the past two posts I have written about getting people to pay attention I have written about social networking where sort blasts of information are the way you get people’s attention. We will go back to that next week with Twitter but for this week I am writing about Blogs where we share several paragraphs of content and sometimes more with our readers. Blog stand for Web Log and it is good to think of it as a place to log activity and share thoughts.

In the article we are going to address using blogs for small business. There are blogs for politics, cooking, medicine, news, sports, and almost anything else you can imagine. If someone does it they have probably blogged about it. To get an idea of what is out there Technorati and Ice Rocket are great places to search. Social Bookmarking sites like Digg and Del.icio.us can help you see what content is popular.

Rather than try and dance around the issue of what should be in a blog for your small business and what should not I will give you the tool I use. Will my readers care? If I cannot answer in the affirmative than there is no reason for me to post. Just because you can post about what you ate for dinner does not make it relevant to my readers, now if you are a personal chef and you just made the best Salmon and mustard sauce that you want your readers to know you can make for them then this is a perfectly relevant post.

There are many tools to help you blog and some of them pug directly in your website like Ballet Nouveau Colorado, in Broomfield or you can have your blog be on a separate site like the Denver DataMan blog you are reading. There are lots of blog sites that bring together many well known or talented bloggers like Examiner.com that has many topics Eric Elkins an accomplished blogger and owner of WideFoc.us a social media strategies company. Eric writes as the Internet Business Examiner. When considering the placement of your blog consider who will read it, why they will read it, when they will read it, if only one person will write on it or if many users will share in the writing.

If you are going to start a blog make sure you have the time to commit to keeping it up to date. I am not perfect about this are there are times I go two weeks without posting and then post three times in a week, but the better you can be about regular posting the more you will get people coming to look for your posts or RSSing your posts for future reading.

If you are not ready to blog a good way to get started is to read others blogs and make comments. Blogs are designed to be replied to. Good blog authors do not sensor appropriate material even if it argues with their point. Our goal is to Join a Conversation and encourage others to interact, share our blog with others and keep your message flowing. With social networking and social bookmarking your blog can become a hit very quickly. Tools like Nielsen’s Blog Pulse help you track where your blog is linked to or forwarded.

The two most important things you can take away from this is that when you blog you need to do so consistently and always ask yourself will my users care.

Next we I will write about Micro Blogging using twitter and how all of these social media technologies can come together to help you make your small business thrive. Also consider attending the Denver DataMan March Social Networking Seminar series.

Defining Yourself as an Expert Online Part 6 of 6

For those who have read all my blog posts for the last 5 weeks about using the Internet to define yourself as an expert I appreciate it. For those of you who have not you might want to look at one or all of these articles to help you get more from this wrap up.

• Introduction Article
• Using Your Website to Define Yourself as an Expert
• Using Your Blog to Define Yourself as an Expert
• Using Social Networking to Define Yourself as an Expert
• Using Email Marketing to Define Yourself as an Expert
• Using Local Resources to Define Yourself as an Expert

Each of these articles provides one aspect of the parts of a plan. Your Internet marketing plan cannot work effectively if it is an island and not part of an overall plan to increase brand awareness and differentiate yourself from the others you compete with.

The reason for a plan is to see the big picture of what you are doing and evaluate what success means. It is very easy to invest all your time in answering questions on LinkedIn Answers or sending out the best eNewsletter the world has ever seen but if these things are not part of a greater plan how will they help you?

I love the book Good to Great by Jim Collinsand in the book the idea of a Hedgehog Concept is revealed. The Hedgehog concept asks three questions of a company that relate to a business plan but are the most overarching questions a business can ask should relate to marketing as well.

1. What you can be the best in the world at (and, equally important, what you cannot be the best in the world at)?

2. What drives your economic engine?

3. What you are deeply passionate about?

You can read more about this on the Good to Great Website but the crux of the story is that where these circles intersect that is your business. Once you know this about your business you can apply it to your marketing.

What marketing tools show that you are the best in the world as something that matches your economic engine and you are deeply passionate about. If you don’t like the idea of email and in fact you hate getting email you will not do a good job with it and it is not the right tool for you.

If answering questions online takes all your time than it does not match your economic engine. It is nice and important to share the knowledge we have but we must do it in a way that helps makes sure we have food on our plate.

It is important not spread yourself to thin. Is it better to be in more places with junk or fewer places with high quality content? I would hope you would say that quality is more important than quantity. Consistency is also a critical factor. Can you keep up the quality writing 4 blog posts a week or is it better to write 2 and sometimes three to keep up the quality?

Remember, email marketing is part ‘how we are doing this’ as well. Try to collect where you connect, meaning that if you are connecting with people ask for their email address for your email newsletter. You should have a form on your website, links on your blog and your social networking presence. Research suggests that email is the preferred media for reaching people over 30 and that it will be for a long time.

One of the tricks to all this is give people the information they want when they want it. You should provide links between your presences just like we talked about above with sign-up opportunities. The Denver DataMan contact page lists many ways and places to Contact Denver DataMan giving everyone the tools they want.

I hope you feel that you have better tools to define yourself as an expert. It is a lot of work and you will find there are things about it that are very hard but using it can also be a lot of fun. Share, grow and discover how these new technologies can help you.

Using Your Blog to Define Yourself as an Expert Part 2 of 5

Last week, I wrote about using your website to establish yourself as an expert. Blogs are another tool to sharing information with your clients, prospects, and partners, supports that will differentiate you from the crowd.

What is Blogging?

Blog stands for WeB Log, a type of web content that is used for sharing informal updates. Generally, blogs have at least one poster who shares information about their prospective about  anything in the world. Blog posts will generally have dates and be sorted chronologically. However, because there isn’t an Internet-wide guide for blogging, this can be implemented differently by different websites.   

There are bloggers who blog about politics, bloggers who blog about what they ate, bloggers who blog about parenting, bloggers that blog about their business, and those that share about anything else you can imagine. Because there is often no cost to blog, many people star a blog for the fun of it and the quality can vary greatly.

The quality of your posts must  be worth reading. I don’t always have my editor read my blog posts because they don’t need to be as formal as other items. However, this special edition is more formal and even though I am using my blog it has still been edited.

Blogs should be updated often to be effective. This can be very hard. We all have a hundred things that we should do and deciding to make posting on a blog a priority is not easy. However, if we want people to come back to our blog to see what we have to say, then we need to make the time. Popular blogs can have many people visiting them in addition to using RSS   to send updates. For example you can use RSS for  a feed of content updates about the DDM blog.

Other ways that people find your blogs are through links on your website, search engines like Google, and blog search engines like Technorati. Social bookmarking sites like Digg and Del.icio.us help drive traffic to your blog.

You can build a blog on your own site with the help of a web developer or you can use a blog service like Blogger, Word Press, Thoughts.com and others.  You should look for a service that is easy to use. I like Blogger because it is free, easy, and reliable. Ideally your Blog should look more like your website than mine does, but I am trying to demonstrate the use of a third party blogging site. 

Blogging on these sites are focused on text and having a few  ictures and video. Picture blogging, video blogging and podcasts are valid tools to use as well. If you want to make the assertion that you are an expert on a given talk, how better to do it than to make Podcast?  That is, if you have the time.

Video blogging, or blogging by posting video s something that is becoming more and more popular. This is still primarily a social trend, but if you have things you want to show or topics that require more of a demonstration, then video blogging can be done.  

Podcasting refers to audio recordings that are done regularly. Many news agencies and some companies are using Podcasting. You can use RSS tosubscribe to Podcasts so that they are automatically downloaded for you. iTunes may be the best tool for this job.

Overall, blogging gives you a less formal tool to help you establish yourself as an expert. Come back next week for part III using email newsletters.