10 Tips to Better Business Blogging

  Blogging opens up a new way of communication, but having a blog is just the beginning of a journey to the exciting blogosphere. Owning a business blog is entirely different than a personal blog. If you are just starting out, expect to make mistakes, but don't give up!

It helps to think about the growth of a blog as exponential. www.topandtrending.com Well, not all of them end up like that. But especially if your company is not a popular brand, your blog will grow somewhat slowly in the first few months or even a year. www.streamkro.com The good news is, if you stick at it for long enough, it will snowball and bring great impact to your marketing.

First time bloggers need to understand this: business blogs which are here for the long haul require a lot of work and time. Consistency and frequency are two most important keys to building a great blog and attracting an audience. A blogger who underestimates this will more than likely be throwing all their efforts down the drain.

Here are 10 tips to use and promote your blog:

1) Write like you talk. Don't talk at your readers, but in a personal tone like you talk to a friend. A good trick to do this is by defining a clear target market and then takes it down further to an individual. Every time you blog, write to the person as if you are talking to him/her.

2) Choose the right person to blog. A blogger should know your company or the topics you want to blog about inside out. No one knows your business and market like you, but if for some reason you can't do it, delegate to one - or a group of bloggers - who know your business. The right person may not even be somebody in marketing, but possibly could be in customer support or a technical person.

3) Post regularly. Frequency matters, after some time as you establish an audience, readers expect you to post content often. That's the reason they come back to your blog or subscribe to your RSS feed. Consistency creates stickiness.

4) Bloggers are generous linkers. Do link to other posts, news resources, authority sites and give credit where credit is due. Doing this appropriately can help you in building relationships with other bloggers in your industry. Bloggers appreciate the links and will often link back.

5) Encourage feedback and conversation. Commenting is one of the most unique features of a blog. If you keep people for writing comments on your blog, they will do that on their own blog. Use trackback when necessary to continue the conversation.

6) Know your keywords. Having the right keywords can help your ranking and is one of the important on-page factors for search engine optimization. A keyword or key phrase is basically what people enter into search engines like Google and Yahoo! to find you. Common places search engine robot look for keywords are in the title, various heading tags, body copy, text formats, and link texts.

7) Add supporting pictures. Visual content improves a blog, but should enhance what you write in the post. Using a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) blog editor, you can do this without having to know any HTML code, and are very easy once you begin.

8) Promote your blog consistently. Renew your signature file to point to your blog, tell your newsletter readers about it, promote it in your presentations, talk about it on the next networking event, and so on.

9) Encourage RSS/Atom feed subscription. There are always people who like your blog on the first visit, but forget about it tomorrow. If you hook them with your blog's RSS/Atom feed, your content will be syndicated automatically the next time you update your blog and chances are better they will remember you.

10) Socialize. Blogging is essentially a social tool. While you can involve in discussion across multiple blogs, networking propels your efforts to the next level. Bloggers tend to link to other blogs they know.

No one can build a successful blog overnight, unless he/she is a very influential or a famous person. Don't blog just because your colleague says that it is going to be the trend.

Blogging requires a lot of resources, but if done properly, can be a great marketing medium from which you can reap later. A blog extends your marketing reach to the next level, but remember, it should be used in addition to other marketing strategies.

Build Blog Traffic Fast

Ok you're first hot trends blog is set up and ready for visitors to come and read your content and hopefully click on your money making links. So let's get some visitors. Obviously we want all we can get in a short period of time.

Since we can't really count on Google to index out blog within 24 to 48 hours, so we can start seeing some traffic from organic searches, we need to build some back links to our blog that will generate traffic to our post from people interested in the content.

Here's the formula:

More links from popular sites = higher search engine positions for your page.

But for our Purposes:

The initial traffic boost comes from people using Social Bookmarking sites INSTEAD of search engines. Why? Because millions of people have learned that people who are actual users and not machines do a much better job of categorizing topical RELEVANT information than search engines do. Not that they have stopped using search engines all together, but they have found that their favorite social bookmarking site(s) are a viable resource.

Some Hot Trends Linger

When a hot trend lingers (Stays hot for a week or 2), back links from popular sites to your hot trend blogs can make a significant difference. How does Social Bookmarking build or generate traffic to your hot trends blog? The top (PR-5 and above), Social Bookmarking sites are very popular and therefore just getting your blog URL, description of your content and tags (Keywords), generate traffic from the social bookmarking sites themselves.

Google sees links coming from the more popular sites as having more weight when listing your blog in search engine results. If you have done your hot trends research right, there will be some ongoing interest in your hot trend topic.

(Note: In case you are not aware, PR ratings are popularity ratings Google assigns to sites based on numerous attributes including traffic served, searches for, searches found and the relevancy of those searches.) The higher the PR rating, the more popular the site is and the higher the PR rating. The lowest rating is - 0 - and the highest is 10. Anything ranked above a PR-5 is pretty popular, PR-7 and above are VERY popular and therefore are a great sites to have links from, (In the form of bookmarks), back to your site/blog.

Link building is a natural by-product of social bookmarking sites. Since you are using your links and blog posts as leverage while you network, it becomes very simple to locate groups of interest, and then to proceed with sharing your links through article submissions and relevant posts.

You don't have to get carried away with putting together your profile page on these sites. Something simple will do. Why? Because your primary reason for setting up an account is to build back links, not to socialize or make friends.

Increasing links to your website can be done in a few different ways, without spamming:

o Commenting on blogs, articles, and posts and providing link back information of relevance which is your hot trends content.

o Making sure people are aware of information that you have posted, by copying and pasting the link on relevant discussions or comments at the blogs on the hot trend you researched.

These are all effective traffic builders for your website, and can start to spread the message about a particular about your take on a hot trend topic by getting your links to your hot trends blog post bookmarked into the top social bookmarking sites.