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The winter Olympics are off to an interesting start, as always. And while I’ve only caught parts, I did manage to watch short track skating when Apolo Ohno miraculously won silver. From the qualifying heats to the final race he was pretty amazing to watch.
While his competition in those qualifying races wasn’t super stiff, you could still see the mark of experience…As well as how strong and fit he is going into this competition. In both of those early heats he calmly hung out in the back of the pack waiting for the chance to make his move.
Then, when that chance came, he made it in a big way. In the second qualifying heat he passed all five other skaters with one huge burst of speed…flying past them so fast he easily gained, and held, a half-lap lead for the rest of the race.
Pretty impressive for a guy who’s old enough—and medaled enough—to retire happily. Yet here he is again, past the age when most speed skaters retire, and he’s never been more prepared to compete and win!
In a recent Seattle Times profile of Apolo Anton Ohno (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/olympics/2010986192_ohno07.html ), Ron Judd said “In his 13 years in the sport, Ohno has become an advanced student of short-track. He watches race tape like a football coach. He studies other teams’ training regimens. He has soaked up all the sports-performance knowledge thrown his way in a decade of residence at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs and used it to retool his body to compete with younger racers whose legs don’t scream as loudly at the end of the day.”
By now you’re probably wondering what all this has to do with marketing your business. Well, there’s a lot you can learn from Ohno’s example.
Here’s a guy who has been competing successfully since he was 14 years old, yet he’s still trying to get better. And he does it by studying the competition, seeing what others have done and are doing today, then changing his own training regimen as a result. And practicing hard.
When was the last time you truly studied your competition’s marketing? Or analyzed what worked and what didn’t in your last marketing campaign?
If you’re like most entrepreneurs, the answer to both of those questions is: “Never!”
What about training? What are you doing to make sure your next marketing effort is more successful than your last? If the answer is nothing, then the chances are good that you’re not going to be any more successful down the road.
If you want to grow your business you’ve got to practice, train, and frankly, do what most other entrepreneurs don’t. Below are three things you can do right now to help turn yourself into an Olympic caliber entrepreneur:
1) Watch your competition. Ohno regularly looks at other teams training regimens. Then he takes what he learns and applies it to his own skating.
Most entrepreneurs never take the time to see what their competition is doing. Yet that’s one of the best ways to figure out what you could or should be doing to grow your business.
So take some time to do a bit of Internet research and see what your competition offers, how they offer it, what they charge, and how they market themselves.
2) Study. Marketing is one of the most important aspects of running a business. Because if you don’t market your business effectively, no one will know you exist or what you have to offer and you won’t have any clients. Without clients you don’t have a business.
Yet few entrepreneurs spend any time at all studying marketing. While you can’t exactly watch and analyze race tapes, you CAN review books filled with winning advertising and marketing campaigns. Many books written by Ad greats John Caples or David Ogilvy are packed with sample ads and breakdowns of what made them great.
3) Practice. Olympic athletes practice a lot…WAY more than most entrepreneurs for sure. Apolo Ohno practice three times a day. And even then he still doesn’t always win in competition.
Few entrepreneurs practice marketing at all, yet they expect to win all the time. And are discouraged when they don’t.
Need to write new content for your Website? Don’t expect to get it perfect the first time. Create many practice drafts, then edit until it’s the best it can be. If you’re planning to send out a sales letter, write a few versions and test them. Then refine them until you’re getting the results you’re after. 
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Thomas Edison famously remarked that genius was "1% inspiration, 99% perspiration." For bloggers this means that if you put your effort into it, you can create a blog that gathers a following. If you look at a group of bloggers, one with a worldwide following and the rest with small audiences, the former will not necessarily be the best writer, the funniest, the smartest or even the one with the most inside info or useful tips. The great bloggers you follow yourself could have varying amounts of these characteristics.
So what separates the good bloggers from the ones with larger followings? Many call it the "x factor." Since this is a bit amorphous we'll touch on it later. You can take your first steps toward creating an engaging blog that builds a loyal following by following some simple guidelines. There are definitely tips, techniques and tools that will get you there and equip you to compete in the blogging big leagues. We'll return to the "x factor" after getting you to that starting line.
Audience as foundation
Know your audience. Marshall McLuhan observed almost 50 years ago that the world was transforming into a "global village" through mass communication. The global village is here. People don't log on to the Internet to be lectured. They log on for information, but also for intelligent dialogue – for exchange, for discussion, for sharing – with people like themselves. Know your audience and the information and conversation they are looking for. You need to engage your readers and speak directly to them with a personal touch, a sense of inclusion, and even a hint of intimacy. Blogs are about relationships, and relationships are about discussions and dialogues of all kinds. The "Monologue Era" is over. Your blog will succeed to the extent that you connect with your audience.
In our Dialogue Era, if you offer people something useful you can become a resource. People bookmark resources and return to them repeatedly, expecting more of the same. Once you have defined your audience you must set about adding value to their visits. Provide information helpful to your audience. Write clearly and don't try too hard – be natural but concise, instructive but conversational. Produce useful, supportive and brief pieces that people can apply – today, tomorrow, whenever. That will show they can return for more information without wasting their time. Blogs are not articles, so keep them to the point, but do not enforce an arbitrary word limit. Your length will depend on your topic and your audience – make every word count.
Draw them in, move them along
To engage an audience in the first place, craft interesting headlines that invite readers in and use subheads to move them along and allow them to scan for the specific information they are looking for. The flow is enhanced if you keep sentences shorter rather than longer, and active rather than passive. Don't posture, pretend, boast or brag, and always maintain a healthy skepticism and sense of humor. You are not writing great literature, your helping your neighbor. Finally, always review your output and rewrite where necessary. During this process, make words "pay their rent" by weeding out unnecessary ones.
You have many things to consider, a number of bottom lines – plural. Bottom line: You need to read about writing, learn how to edit and refine your technique over time. Bottom line: You need to learn the particular writing techniques that have evolved around blogs, like how to craft good bullet points, when to use them, how to use the page layout to your advantage and so forth. Bottom line: You have to continue reading your competition and your colleagues, often one and the same, and analyze what works and what doesn't. Bottom line: There are a lot of bottom lines in blogging.
Go forth and blog
Coming full circle, then, let's consider that "x factor" again. Although it's not possible to define it quite precisely, we know where it is located. It is in you. It is your personality, your spark, your unique outlook. Be yourself, not what you think they want you to be. In that jigsaw puzzle that is "you" there are many traits and abilities, opinions and truisms, dreams and fears, and the sum total of them all is what adds up to "you" – and no one else – and your own real personality coming off the page is often what engages people. How can you inject "you" into your writing? There's only one way to draw it out, of course, and that is to write.
Since you are forming relationships, do what Dale Carnegie advised about 80 years ago and ask small favors of your readers. Invite their comments. Ask for their opinion. Encourage them to express their point of view. This tells them you value what they think. More importantly, it engages them and makes them a valuable active participant (instead of a passive visitor), a member of your community, and part of an ongoing and growing dialog. This is what will lead many of them to make the all-important cognitive leap that will have them bookmark your blog, link to your posts, tell all their friends about it and continue the dialog. The leap occurs when readers stop thinking of themselves as readers, and start thinking of themselves as "stakeholders" – readers that interact with you.
If you can convert readers into stakeholders, you're on your way.
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I'm a different person at work than I am at home. I tell different jokes. I have different stories. I share different experiences with different people in different ways depending on a host of different factors (e.g., how well we know each other; where we went to school; what our shared interests may be, etc.).
The context in which I know people is different from one person, one situation to the next. By and large, this is a good thing. I wouldn't want my co-workers to know all that my wife knows and my wife wouldn't be interested in all that my co-workers know.
Not surprisingly, online these relationships play out differently through different social networks. As a fairly engaged social networker (and dork), I recently tested my own social networks for what I'm calling, "social overlap" – the percent of overlapping "friends and followers" I have between the three social networks I am engaged in most: Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter. (I highly recommend doing this exercise yourself, it shows a number of revealing insights about yourself. Here are some of mine. I'd love to hear your findings in the comments.
This analysis shows how few of my contacts overlap between different social networking platforms. This online fact echoes my offline reality of having different kinds of relationships with different people depending on the context of how we know one another.
My own lack of "social overlap" is complemented by a recent report from Forrester. Analyst Jeremiah Owyang (who recently left the company) suggests, "Today's social experience is disjointed because consumers have separate identities in each social network they visit." Owyang goes on to say, "This creates friction for consumers who must now manage multiplying personal information and username/password combinations."
As a solution to this "friction" Owyang predicts that people will bring a single online identity from one social network to the next. Early examples of this prediction coming to light are "Facebook Connect," which allows users to "connect" their Facebook identity to any site, and "Open ID," a potential social network standard for a shared identity system.
However, a single online ID seems out of synch with how we (or at least I) naturally relate to others in our offline/real world lives. Maybe I like having different platforms on which to interact with co-workers vs. family members. Maybe I'm not comfortable showing the same side of me to everyone I know, regardless of how I know them. Maybe my lack of "social overlap" online is a good thing...much as it is offline.
The point here is not to knock a single online ID, it's to ask bigger questions about who we are on the social web. How are we different consumers in different contexts? What permission do we give different brands on different sites? How does your brand fit in with your customers on Facebook differently than it does on Twitter? Because it's not just a different tool, it may be a "different person" with whom you're connecting.
These questions point to the critical need to listen first before coming to market with a social media strategy. To understand how your customers think of your brand, product or service as relevant and meaningful in different social media contexts. Because maybe your customers are not the same people in one context that they are in another.
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Welcome to part three of this three part series on SEO tools and resources. In the last two articles we discussed the variety of Firefox extensions used for SEO as well as an assortment of other free or affordable SEO tools. In this article we'll discuss some of the resources you'll want to access on a regular basis to keep up to date and informed on the goings-on in the search engine and SEO realm.
We're doing to cover a few different types of resources below and I'm going to try to keep this article to a reasonable length so let's begin ...
Media
when there's a breaking story or you want an expert opinion on a subject, a good first place to hit is the media sources in that industry. The SEO industry is no different and there are some amazing albeit often unconventional media sources. Some of my favorite are:
Webmaster Radio is an Internet-based radio station with some great programing ranging from affiliate marketing to PPC to organic optimization and much more. With shows hosted by experts in their fields from Danny Sullivan (Search news) to Dave Szetela (PPC) you'll solid information that is well-sounded. I'd list my favorite shows however what I like may be different than you and what I need to know may be different than what you need to know so look through their programming and either listen through your work day as I often do or download the podcasts for later listening.
WebProNews offers up-to-the-minute information on virtually every event. They have reporters writing constantly and have other scoring SEO blogs and other news sources, compiling the information in one place for easy access. They also have great articles by third-party writers and a very active readership that is proactive in their commenting. Definitely near the top of my go-to list when I'm looking for news and current feedback.
This site is difficult to classify as it fits into a couple categories but I decided to include under media as that's my primary use. They include tools, resources, a directory and much more on their site. My primary use of this site is for the articles and newsletter.
No list of SEO resources would be complete without including Search Engine Watch. This site is the one that started it all. Search Engine Watch provides everything from fantastic articles to breaking news to search engine stats and an awesome forum. A definite bookmark.
Blogs
As with many industries – blogs are a great way to keep informed on the latest goings-on in the SEO realm. The trick, however, is figuring out which blogs are worth reading and which authors are truly knowledgeable. Over the years I've read many blogs and to be honest – I still do. Below are some of the key blogs I reference on a regular basis.
Aaron Wall over at SEO Book has an excellent blog worth reading on a regular basis. I have yet to visit his blog and not find some tid-bit of information that was worth reading either because of the information itself or because often he's just entertaining. Another to add to your weekly reading list.
It's nice to get it from the horse's mouth. For those who don't know – Matt Cutts is the head of Google's Webspam team. He blogs about Google, technology and occasionally his cat. One has to read what he writes knowing that he's a Google employee and as such can't really give away the farm BUT he gives tons of great advice, insight and tips. The perk being – this time you don't have to ask if following his advice will get you banned. :)
Bill Slawski (the author) focuses his attentions on the more technical side of things with tales of patents, algorithmic possibilities, statistics and functionalities. For many, his would be one of the more dry blogs if not for his gift with words and ability to make even the most bland of subject, palatable. You don't need to visit his blog daily but adding it to your weekly journey through the web is recommended.
What blog list would be complete without the inclusion of the SEOmoz blog. Rand Fishkin and crew keep their visitors up-to-date of some great research, news and SEO tips. From opinion pieces to months-long whitepapers you'll find useful information. Again – not necessary to visit every day but a weekly pass is always worthwhile.
Forums
Forums are a great place to gather information, especially on current events such as ranking updates. That said, reading forums can be a risky thing. Almost anyone can join a forum and post their thoughts. While this format allows us to capture a wide range of information and knowledge – it also results in less qualified people giving advice as well. So while I recommend reading forums – I also recommend taking things with a grain of salt – at least until you figure out who's who.
The SEO chat forums are easily one of the largest and most popular of the SEO forums. They cover a HUGE array of issues from Google to social media to Alexa rankings to (hold your hats) Ask Jeeves (that's right – the forum's been around for THAT long). Users worth noting are rustybrick, fathom, and randfish.
DigitalPoint also is an ancient forum (2000 – ancient by web standards at least). They cover a wide range of topics from SEO to PPC to affiliate programs. Some users worth noting there are shoemoney, daven, and of course digitalpoint. A great place to ask your questions. Heavily visited and they have a ranking system for their users so you can get a decent feel as to whether they're reliable.
There are a variety of reasons I like SitePoint and I own a number of their books. Their forums focus on design and development (not SEO) but every SEO needs resources on the design and development side.
Newsletters & Other Resources
Of course there are other resources that every SEO or webmaster needs to be able to get their hands on. Here they are:
These are the guidelines set out by Google telling you what you can and can't do and what tactics to look out for. Worth a look over periodically as the do change from time-to-time. If you're heading into the forums for advice you'll definitely want to gander at the guidelines first to make sure that if you get lead astray – at least you'll know what can get you banned or penalized first.
A social media site for SEO. Here you'll find user-submitted stories on a wide array of Internet Marketing topics. Obviously the quality and relevancy of the stories ranges from brilliant to utter crud but the cream usually rises to the top with good stories hitting page one. That said – an occasional peek at specific threads often reveals some hidden gems.
Perhaps I should have included this in the media section above as it's a fine site unto itself but it was the newsletter component that I find most helpful and so I have decided to place it here. Sign up for their newsletter and you'll get daily notification as to when some of the major search engine events happen and some solid advice as to what it means for you.
Jill over at High Rankings puts out a solid newsletter where she provides tips and advice including replies to visitor questions. While I may disagree with some of her points from time to time (the same can likely be said for more of the resources noted and I'm sure others can say the same about my writings and opinions) I've never seen her provide bad advice – my advice just might be different from time-to-time.
Conclusion
Obviously there are a ton more tools and resources available. In this series of articles I've tried to include those that apply to the broadest spectrum of people and that are the most helpful. I highly recommend hunting for your own – especially if you've got issues that you can't find help for here.
Good luck to all the DIYers out there.
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Welcome to part two of this three part series on SEO tools and resources. In the last article we discussed the variety of Firefox extensions used for SEO. In this article we'll discuss some of the free and affordable tools you can use to better your organic optimization efforts. To make sure that when I say affordable I mean for virtually everyone I'm going to set the bar at $100/yr or ownership. Admittedly, we use tools that cost more than this but many of those tools will be out of some people's price range.
Here are some of the key tools you need to use to help insure the successful optimization of your website.
Many of you are likely familiar with Google's keyword tool but it needs to be noted. This is a great resources to researching keywords. As with all keyword tools, it has it's limitations and most would agree that it seems to overestimate search volume but nonetheless – it is probably the best of the keywords tools out there, especially at the price.
No individual set of data is perfect and no stage of the SEO process is more important than keyword research and selection. Keyword Discovery is a great tool to compare with the Google keyword data. Where you find commonalities you know that 2 independent sets of data agree. With a free trial that may itself work for many – it's certainly worth looking into.
While the paid version of this tool is more than the $100/yr max I noted previously – the free version provides some great data. Simply enter a competitor URL and you'll find out some valuable data about the keywords they rank for both organically and AdWords. This is great for competitor analysis as well and finding keywords you might not have thought of.
A fantastic free tool that crawls websites, reporting back all the broken links. Over time almost all sites get broken links – running this tool periodically will help you find them so you can fix them.
Arguably one of the most important of the SEO tools. Google Webmaster Tools allows webmasters (and SEO's of course) to see their website the way Google does. With this tool you'll get to see what your site is appearing for in the results, what pages on your site are linked to but don't exist, and a wide array of errors and statistics.
With this information you can repair a number of issues. If your site is appearing for phrases that you're not getting traffic from you can review your titles and descriptions to see if you can improve your clickthrough rate. Xenu won't show you the links from other sites that are pointing to pages that don't exist – Google Webmaster Tools will. You'll also find good backlink information for your site as well as a lot more.
Page Prowler is a backlink research tool that allows the user to collect large amounts of potential backlink information, sort that data by site strength, and then proceed to pursue these backlinks. The use of this tool is primarily in the way of saved time. There is no function of it that cannot be done manually however it can compile data that would take a person hours or days to collect quickly and easily.
Full disclosure – Shawn (the developer) asked me to advise on the development of this link building tool and I'm also assisting in it's marketing. I was extremely impressed with Shawn's first version (PR Prowler) and this new software includes additional functions and information. I felt the need to note this but I'll also note that we at Beanstalk use this tool regularly. I would not include it here if it didn't deserve to be and I'd include it here if I had nothing to do with it other than my using it.
Advanced Web Ranking is probably the most affordable of the better rank checking software programs. It has a ton of great features including scheduling and auto-report generation. You can set the searches to take place slowly to reduce the impact on the search engines. I still recommend to run it in the evening to further minimize your impact during high-volume search periods.
Multiple Keyword Rack-Checking Tool
This is probably one of the most popular tools on the Beanstalk site. One of the pet peeves I always had with online rank checking tools was checking rankings one-at-a-time. This tool allows you to check your rankings on Google ten at a time. Apparently other agree as it's the most used tool of our set.
While in this list we're tried to include a solid set of very affordable tools, you might mind value in tools we don't use. This list is regularly updated and includes some very interesting (though not part of my daily arsenal) tools. Highly recommended to visit at least once. I have it in my bookmarks and check back every couple months to see what new tools have launched.
Next Week
In part three we'll be taking a look at a slough of invaluable SEO resources that you need to visit regularly to keep up-to-date on this ever-changing industry. While there are more than can be listed in a single article, I'll be covering my first points of access when I'm looking for news or others' opinions on SEO and search engine events.
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Every SEO uses different tools and resources. Some tools are paid, some are free and some are internally developed tools that we use for ourselves and our clients - but we all use them. Very often I get asked what tools people should use if they're looking to optimize their own sites and what resources they should use to keep up with the latest going's on. While telling people how to optimize their own sites and what the tools we use isn't generally the best of business practices – I just can't help myself. If your budget doesn't allow for the hiring of a professional SEO company – trying it yourself may be the only option. I also try to remember that once-upon-a-time I was optimizing my own sites and was new to SEO and without the open advice of others already involved in the community – I wouldn't be running a successful SEO company today. To this end, it only seems right to provide a list of some of the main tools we use on virtually every site.
When I initially started writing this article I was going to cram a slough of various tools and resources into one article but the article was going to end up running WAY too long to hold your attention (or mine) so I've cut it into three EZ parts (as opposed to three EZ payments which you'll be familiar with if you too watch late night TV with a laptop in front of you writing things like SEO articles). But let's get to the meat of this article shall we? The series will be divide into three parts:
So let's begin with Firefox. Let me first say, I don't know if Firefox is officially the browser of SEO's but if not – it should be. You can download it here.
And now the extensions that make this browser invaluable to SEO's ...
If I had to lose all but one of my SEO tools – this would be the one I'd keep which is why it gets listed first. This little tool allows me to quickly look at the top 10 results in the SERPs and within seconds see all the PageRank, indexed page numbers, backlinks to that page, domain backlinks, the age of the site and much much more.
This tool doesn't provide any revolutionary information in that it's all data that can be accessed directly however it reduces tasks that would take many minutes down to a few second. It then provides easy links to more detailed information. A fantastic tool.
Oh, and it also adds a line through all nofollowed links. Very handy when link building.
Aaron Wall over at SEO Book has added a great tool to the mix that duplicates a lot of functions of SEO Quake but which has enough additional features to be very useful. Basically – neither is a replacement for the other.
Like most tools – it provides information that can be accessed without HOWEVER with this Tool Aaron allows users to find tons of relevant site and keyword information quickly and painlessly. From keyword traffic to keyword trends, from backlink counts to social media mentions – this tools gives quick access to tons of information.
Admittedly I prefer the layout of SEO Quake and some of the easier functionality BUT
A HUGE tumbs way up (two of them in fact) to Joost de Valk who made all our lives simpler when this tool launched. What this tool does is displays the PageRank and anchor test of every link when you perform a backlink check on one of the major engines. I suppose you could visit every single site and get this information yourself and there's value in that to be sure but when you need a quick analysis of a site's backlinks – this tool is invaluable.
As a note – works VERY well with SEO Quake.
With this tool we're getting a bit more advanced. For those of you who understand coding or are learning (and you should be) this tool is incredible. It allows for quick testing and viewing of a site for it's structure including inage info, table and cell information, W3C compliance, CSS details and MUCH MUCH more.
I can't possibly list off all the functions this tool offers and admittedly – I don't use them all but I use enough of them regularly for this tool to make my top 10 list.
This is an odd tool to add and it's purely a convenience tool but like adding a second monitor to your system – once you have it and realize that it saves you just a few seconds but it saves you that dozens of times per day you quickly realize that your productivity relies on it.
With a simple click of a button this tool loads Internet Explorer into your Firefox tab so you don't have to go back-and-forth between browsers when testing. I could survive without it but since you have Firefox anyways ...
This is another tools with many uses. On the surface it simply displays PageRank, Alexa and Compete rank and mozRank data but with a right-click of the icon you get access to a whole sleugh of additional information including fast links to whois, the robots and sitemap files, keyword density information, Archive.org info and it'll even highlight nofollow links.
A lot of thes features overlap other tools noted above but I will say – I have it installed and so should you.
Now this is the main sleugh of extensions I have installed for Firefox (read: the ones I use virtually every day). This isn't to say taht's all there are and I can't stress enough the benefits of visiting https://addons.mozilla.org/ and looking for more useful extensions specific to your needs (RSS, Twitter, coding, etc.) I have about a dozen more installed than are listed here but those above are the main Firefox SEO tools I use daily.
In the next article we'll be taking a look at free and affordable tools that you can use to help improve your website rankings. Be sure to keep your eyes open as there will be many invaluable tools listed there too.
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The term has become so common that most people don’t know that “blog” is a condensed version of “weblog.” It is not a new form of communication, by any means. People have been blogging since man began painting on cave walls, really; it’s just that the tools have changed and the definitions of writing styles have evolved a bit (but just a bit). When the Internet was still without its graphic interface, the World Wide Web, there were the bulletin boards and file-sharing services that allowed the distribution of text files.
Even though the Internet traces its roots way back past Al Gore to the DARPANet (Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration) in 1969, not every article in that era was a description of biological weapons or a flight-simulator log. People would rant, discuss, argue and hold forth on any number of topics. The term weblog seems to have started, some folks say, with one Jorn Barger, who would “surf the net” (not his phrase) and keep a log of what he found interesting, then comment on some of it. As words have a way of doing, “weblog” became “blog” and now they’re everywhere, and everyone has one.
Why don’t you have a blog?
The fact that there are so many blogs is perhaps the most compelling reason that your company should have one. It is no longer noteworthy to have a blog; today people will wonder why you don’t have one. You probably know a lot of reasons why you should have one for your firm, whether your business is plastic extrusion, audio engineering, IT consulting, or anything really. What you need to focus on are all the benefits you are forgoing by not having a blog that represents your product, service or organization.
One immediate benefit is that you are validated as being up to date, a 21st century cybercitizen. If no one knows a thing about your firm except that you have a blog, there is a lot that can be surmised from that one fact. It signifies being computer literate, technology savvy, thorough, and communicative. As mentioned before, it seems odd now when companies don’t have a blog. It was well over a decade ago that having a Web site became an absolute must for businesses, and for a time it was de rigueur for individuals, as well. Now, folks can have a blog instead of a Web site and maintain just about the same level of “cool factor”—but you, as a businessperson, need both.
Quick connections, extended reach
Up-to-the-minute information is no longer good enough. Things change by the second, which is why texting and Twitter have become parts of the communications toolkit, too. A sense of immediacy, the need for updates on a continuous basis, has driven the development of these technologies. However, these are bandwidth-limited and one-dimensional. A blog, on the other hand, has most of the benefits of your Web site—it can carry text, display images, stream media and link to other destinations—but is easier to manage and update. You can make changes at any time without calling the IT department or waiting on your webmaster. This business benefit is immediacy—of contact, information delivery and feedback, all crucially important to any business.
Extending Your Network
Another big benefit is the same thing realtors talk about all the time—location, location, location. You’ve got another location that will be indexed, spidered, cataloged and listed in special blog directories. It can become a side door to your main Web site, or a completely separate site altogether. In any case, the network of links, in both directions, will both differ and grow independent from your business site’s links, too, so you’re capturing more (and more varied) visitors—a business benefit we’ll call “extended reach.” A blog increases the range for your corporate message: it allows greater flexibility of presentation, and has a “personal touch” that makes it friendlier, thus making your message more accessible and absorbable than a business site.
Dialogue with customers (and fans)
Regular, consistent and consistently high-quality blogs will attract a readership that will learn to trust you. As trust is established, your visitors will give you more than just brief feedback. They will engage you in discussions that could result in both of you (as well as your other readers) learning something quite valuable. There is no telling what might happen when you are out there in cyberspace meeting and greeting new people. A blog gives you the opportunity to teach and learn, another broad and valuable benefit.
Finally, because of the less formal look, feel and operation of a blog, you can take chances you might not take with your business and/or e-commerce site. You can try focused promotions, test new marketing ideas, gauge the effect of a new advertisement—and you can be right up-front about the fact you are doing these things. It’s a blog, after all, so you can ask things of visitors that you would not ask a Web site visitor that you’re trying to convert into a buyer. You can be more casual than you could at your business site.
Use common sense and go for it
None of the foregoing should be interpreted to mean that you can just cut loose and rant about politics, religion or your in-laws in any offhanded manner that you choose. If your business name is on that blog, you are still representing the firm and its interests. Yes, you can post personal photos and take the occasional tangent, just as you can commend an employee for a job well done or offer discount coupons for a spur-of-the-moment sale. If it’s a business blog, however, there is a reasonable standard of decorum expected of you and everything that carries the company name.
That said, remember what the benefits are—validation, immediacy, extended reach, flexibility, accessibility, dialogue, teaching and learning, experimentation and test marketing—and use your blog to benefit your business, its Web site and its future. Go forward with the desire to offer as much as possible, and you may be surprised at how much you receive in return.
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