Successful Blog

Go Blogging and See the Results

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New Customers written in search bar on virtual screenDo you sometimes feel like your brand is not getting the attention it deserves and more importantly needs?

For some business owners, their websites can mean the difference between a healthy brand and one that is on life support. Whether your brand is doing well or not so well, are you looking to improve it? If the answer is yes, make sure you review your blogging efforts.

Given the fact that more and more consumers are going online to browse and ultimately buy products and services; having a strong website presence (including a relevant and informative blog) is more critical than ever. So, take some time to see how you can improve your blog or even how to start a blog today.

Blogs Matter More Than Ever

No matter what product or service you sell, blogging about your line of work is a great way to not only attract new customers, but also retain current ones.

With a solid blog on your website, you can:

  • Promote your brand – First and foremost, promoting your brand should always be a priority. A stellar blog on your website allows you to do just that and more. The blog can be an ambassador for your brand, introducing your products and/or services to millions of consumers. Make sure the information contained in your blog is relevant, timely, and provides a call to action without coming across as a sales pitch;
  • Be more socially active – Having a solid blog to work with allows you to be more social, meaning go to social media. Promoting your blog posts opens the door to consumers who may not be familiar with your brand. In turn, you are more likely to get inquiries about your brand when you are publicizing it on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and even YouTube. Just like with your blog, you need to be active on social media, meaning share or tweet regularly in order to maximize your opportunities;
  • Engage with industry experts – While some companies decide to do all their blogging in-house, many others welcome guest bloggers. If you decide to work with guest bloggers, make sure they are a good match for your site’s blog. What kind of experience do they have in blogging? Are they an authority on the topics they speak of? Do they have a decent to solid social media following and will they promote their posts and your site? Yes, some guest posters will not be a good fit for your blog, but many others could be just what you are looking for;
  • Use it as a networking tool – In the event your business attends a number of trade shows and conferences during the year, your blog can be a topic of discussion. Along with promoting the respective event on your blog you will be attending, bring a laptop to the event and set the viewing page to your blog. As attendees visit your booth, it can make for a great conversation piece.

If you’re looking to improve your company’s blog or finally getting around to starting one, know that it can help your brand in so many ways.

Photo credit: BigStockPhoto.com

About the Author: Dave Thomas writes about marketing your business on the web.

How to Create a Blog for Your Unsexy Business

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by Mickie E Kennedy

As the owner of an unsexy business, you might not think you need a blog or that anyone would read it if you did have one. But that really couldn’t be further from the truth. Unsexy businesses make the world go ‘round and sharing what do you will only grow your company.

Is that not enough to convince you?

Here are some other reasons for creating a blog for your company:

  • Building Your Audience—By writing about what you do, why you do it, and sharing other helpful content, you will attract readers that can then turn into customers and friends.
  • Establishing Authority—Writing routinely on a blog about topics in your industry builds your authority in that industry. You are strengthening your professional image and giving the reader a sense of trust in what you have to say.
  • Creating New Opportunities—After you have been writing on your blog, you might be surprised at the opportunities presented to you. Not only getting contacted by potential clients, but also for speaking engagement and guest blogging appearances.

So you want one for your company? That’s awesome news.

The best thing about creating a blog is that it’s easy.

You can either add a blog page to your current website or build one through a free host like WordPress or Blogger.

The hard part comes after you have it up and running and you actually have to write something.

Let’s go over a few tips to make the writing process a little easier.

  1. Set up a Writing Calendar—The biggest difference between a blog and a great blog is commitment. Make a writing calendar and stick to it. Posting regularly ensures return visitors and high search rankings. You can post weekly or daily depending on your schedule as long as you do it regularly.
  2. Promote Your Blog—Share your content through social media and promote your blog when you are talking with clients, colleagues and at speaking engagements. Also share other work that you enjoyed or found useful, but be sure to give credit to the author.
  3. Ask Your Audience—Poll them on Facebook or Twitter for topics that they find interesting. You can also write about a common issue that your company sees frequently and the best way to solve it. Use the blog to connect with your audience.
  4. Giveaways—Your giveaway doesn’t have to be anything huge or expensive. It can be as simple as a book that you enjoyed or tickets to a baseball game. You can set up an email subscription list and give the item to the 500th person to sign up or it can be for a random comment on your blog.
  5. Knowledge—As stated earlier, unsexy businesses make the world go ‘round and your knowledge is extremely valuable. Consider creating a webinar or e-guide for your business and have it available on your blog, social media pages and website. People want to know what you know.

By following these blogging tips, you will set your company apart online. Keep in mind that persistence pays off in the end, so don’t get discouraged if results aren’t immediate.

Do you have any other blogging tips? Talk to us in the comments.

Mickie Kennedy is founder of eReleases.  You can download his free ebooks and whitepapers here.

Featured image via Flickr CC: Les Chatfield

Make Your Blog Stand Out from the Crowd

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By Mickie Kennedy

There are a ton of resources and websites all devoted to the same thing: helping bloggers make their content stand out from the crowd (you’re on one right now — one of the best, as a matter of fact). The end result, however, will all depend on how much work you are willing to put into building a community and making them aware of what you are doing.

Jenny Lawson, the mind behind The Bloggess, is a perfect example of a blogger who promotes her content, her books, and herself without seeming to promote her content, her books, or herself.

This is because she has built a loyal community that follows her posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr, read her books, and eagerly await her next Pin. She is genuine and kind to all of her fans no matter how long she has been signing books or answering yet another fan email.

She also readily admits her failings, like her sometimes-losing battles with depression, which only encourages her fans to root for her all the more.

This is something all bloggers need to do in order to achieve maximum success for their work. They need to reach out and start building a community of people interested in work similar to what they are doing. As part of this, bloggers should:

1. Start a webstore

If you haven’t already started expanding your site, consider yet another lesson from Jenny Lawson: add a shop. Have any catchphrases? A cool logo? Put it on a shirt or a mug and capitalize. Not only will this throw some spare change your way, but when a fan goes out of their way to buy something from you, you know you’ve got a fan for life.

2. Social Media

Join groups on Facebook, start tweeting, or build a Google+ network in order to start talking with fellow writers and potential readers. If you blog in a niche, you may also find that certain fan forums or other, lesser-known social media platforms work best for you.

3. Email Marketing

Encourage fans to opt-in to your email marketing campaigns. Give them a reason to opt-in, such as exclusive content, giveaways, or discounts to your webstore.

4. Guest Blog

Once you are up and running, look into guest blog opportunities and then share a good story with another group of readers.

5. Speak

Never pass up an opportunity to speak at conferences, to local groups, or at workshops.

Remember that with all of these publicity options, you want to treat your readers, fans, and followers like you would a friend. Would you spam a friend? Not likely. Keep the message genuine to inspire more people to want to follow you.

Any other tips to help bloggers? Let us know in the comments!

Author’s Bio: Mickie Kennedy, founder of eReleases, offers free ebooks and white papers for anyone looking to take their PR game to a new level.

5 hot call to action tips for business bloggers

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You’re blogging for a reason, right?

If your blog is part of your business strategy, it’s time to do a check-up on your call to action (CTA).

A call to action is something that is intended to provoke a response in your reader.

It could be a bright red box that says “click here,” it could be a pretty picture of the cover of your e-book saying, “download now,” or it could be “set an appointment today.” Those are overt calls to action.

call to action

It could be more subtle, like a series of recommended blog posts. Those are calling the reader to read more, to explore your useful content.

Without any call to action, your blog posts are just spaghetti tossed against the wall.

Read these five tips that will help you clarify and enhance your calls to action right now (see what I did there?):

  1. First, consider what action you want to provoke. It should be obvious to your audience what they’re supposed to do when they land on your blog. Do you sell a product? Are you a consultant? Are you a thought leader/speaker? Your purpose must be clear in your own mind before you can communicate it to your visitors.

    And if you don’t know why you’re blogging, that might be ok (you’re just a writer who needs to write), just don’t expect to be getting revenue from your blog.

  2. Color me beautiful. Color theory is its own course of study, but there are some basic tenets you can apply. The folks at crazyegg.com produced a great infographic that summarizes the psychology of different color choices. Your CTA should be differentiated and appealing.
  3. Location, location, location. The human eye tends to read a web page in a zig-zag pattern, starting at the top left corner. We know that images and videos attract the eye, too. Consider putting your CTA in an attractive image that sits above the “fold”.
  4. Copywriting 101. Be brief.
  5. Track success and change it up if necessary. Know in advance what success looks like. Is it number of e-books downloaded? Is it number of paid consulting gigs? Is it number of unique visitors to your site? Think about using a unique link identifier on your CTA so that you can see it in your Google Analytics as a goal completion.

If I visited your blog today, would I know what you want me to do?

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for Social Strata — makers of the Hoop.la community platform. Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Head Smacking Realities: Why Blogging Isn’t Doing a Thing for Your Business

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By Tracy Vides

“Have a blog and you’ll start getting inbound leads.

“Blogging helps you gain traction and develop a community.

Companies that have blogs make more sales than those that don’’t have one.

If you did hear one (or all) of those statements but are often wondering why nothing seems to be happening, you aren’t alone. There are millions of blogs that do nothing but exist.

Corporate or business blogging is even more difficult as it’’s like asking businesses to set aside resources to make it happen (compared to individual bloggers who are intrinsically motivated). Nothing happens without a reason and there are plenty of reasons why your blogging efforts aren’’t doing anything to meet your goals yet. Here are some of them:

No plans, no gains

Remember those days when everyone used to carry around business cards? You’d get yourself a set of cards too. Then, everyone and their neighbor got themselves a website and a bunch of social accounts and followed suit. Blogging, more or less, seems to have been bitten by the same bug. You blog because blogging apparently is the ““baby steps” of inbound marketing.

Starting to do something is good, and I won’’t bite you for that. Not having a plan in the sense of not knowing why you blog for your business in the first place is a sore wound.

Do you blog purely to drive sales? Or do you blog to become a thought leader? Do you blog to proliferate your brand name or do you engage in all-out blogging efforts? (Hope you end up getting inspired by How Jon Morrow Writes, as narrated by Demian Farnworth of Copyblogger.)

Figure out why you think you have to blog in the first place. What’’s all this trouble for? Write it down and think about it over a cup of coffee.

You pay attention to worthless stuff

Driven by the incredible amount of information available on digital marketing (most of it is farce, unjustifiable, or maybe just hype), your mind starts to nibble at things that don’’t matter at all: all the drive for ““SEO domination”” lets you believe that keywords should guide your content creation.

The truth is that keywords won’’t matter because the bots don’t buy; people do. All that time spent on social media takes your time away from creating awesome posts. Your blogs are way too short or perhaps way too long. Instead of thinking about your readers, you worry about Meta information, alt text, and backlinks.

There are many of those little gears that have to click in place to make your inbound marketing strategy work, starting with your blog.

Are you doing it right?

It’s not about words, links, or technobabble; it’’s about people.

Bloggers often forget that they are writing for people. Companies are even quicker when it comes to forgetting that blogging is an effort to promote brands, establish credibility, engage with potential and current customers.

David Silverman, author of Typo, and professor of business writing at Harvard, gives this test to his students:

Can you rewrite this bunch of babble into a word or two?

“It is the opinion of the group assembled for the purpose of determining a probability of the likelihood of the meteorological-related results and outcome for the period encompassing the next working day that the odds of precipitation in the near-term are positive and reasonably expected.

Businesses just worry about tools used, platforms that blogs should be based on, and the kind of voice, words, or personality that they expect blog posts to express. Of course, all this counts; individuality does matter, and these are what make blogs different from academic articles. Yet, you shouldn’’t forget that you are writing for people. Relationships still matter. You’ll need to get off the screen and meet actual people. You should be able to sell at a flea market before you can sell online.

Self-centered content strategy

First, your content strategy is self-centered. All that you blog about is how great that vacation has been, how life changing your moving to paradise was, how Venture Capitalists are now trying to break down the doors just so that they can invest, and how you grew your blog from 0 to 67,987 subscribers in 3 months.

What are some of the best examples of narcissistic and self-centered blogs, you ask? Go pick any of those nomadic vagabonds who try to sell you location independence and travel while working. It’s not to say that there’’s no value from such blogs. But more often than not, there’’s the ““me syndrome” creeping in with ““Where I Was Last Week”” and ““Exotic Destinations I’’ve Been To.”

Stand back for a moment. No one cares about you. Your customers — you know, the ones reading your blog — wouldn’t care if you just signed up a million dollar deal, bought another company, merged with a bigger one, or if you now float on $4 billion of excess cash balance in the bank.

All that your customers care about is what you can do for them. How many of your blog posts talk about your customers really? Can you actually count the number of blog posts that share something that doesn’t have anything to do with you, your business, the brand, the products or services?

Crappy content

Your content qualifies as crappy if there’’s no value given to your readers by the end of the post. There’s nothing it for them to ruminate, chew dry bread on, or ponder about. Your blog posts have nothing new to say.

I will repeat that. Your content is dry, sounds like a term paper, and makes readers scroll faster than ever. They won’’t read most of it they’’ll just scroll through and escape. And you’’ll never see them again!

Stop wasting time with blogs that don’’t make an impact. Stop hiding behind words. Show up with some guts and talk to your customers like they were your best friends. Be afraid to own up, accept your mistakes, speak your heart, and get bolder.

Great companies go to the extent of admitting their faux pas. Online marketing firm SEER Interactive admitted screwing up in their link building methods. AirBnB’’s Brian Chesky wrote up a self-deprecating post to own up the apparent horror that a customer had to face.

Doing this takes guts. Can you do it too?

Blogging needs you to post awesomeness regularly. It requires you to show up and be real. It demands that you use the fact that you are human to get other humans to buy from you, believe you, or accept your point of view. It requires you to multi-task. Blogging requires your belief to be brought to fruition by your determination and will.

As long as you produce blog posts because you should, your customers or readers will make it a point to leave because they can.

Author’s Bio: Tracy Vides is a content creator and marketer, who loves to blog about subjects as diverse as fashion, technology, and finance. She’s always raring to have a discussion on startups and entrepreneurship. Say “Hi” to her on Twitter @TracyVides. You can also find her on G+ at gplus.to/TracyVides.

Three Blogging Tricks That Will Save Your Sanity

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Bloggers are always “on deadline.”

No matter what the posting schedule is like (daily, weekly, monthly), there is always another deadline looming. It can feel like one of those hamster wheels where you can’t get off.

With several years of blogging under my belt, I have accumulated some tricks that keep me from losing my mind.

Keep These Blogging Tricks Up Your Sleeve

Rainy Day Posts

The next time you’re feeling especially productive and the words are flowing easily, sock away an extra post that can be “evergreen.” Even better if you have 2-3 extras. Put them in a special folder or Evernote notebook. Break glass in case of emergency.

rainy day blog posts

Writing “Stubs”

Many bloggers keep a running list of topic ideas, which is very useful. However, I like to take it a step further and flesh out the ideas as I have time. Whenever you have a spare moment, add to your “stubs,” without paying too much attention to grammar, structure, etc. Just jot down the bones of the post in a free-flowing way.

If you get bored with one of the “stubs,” move on to another one that’s more inspiring in that moment. No pressure to complete it, add URLs, etc., just get the ideas out of your brain and into the “stub” bucket.

Over time, you’ll have a fertile ground for picking up “stub” posts and completing them when you’re not feeling able to punch out an entire post from scratch. No more blank page staring at you.

Set up a Series

Establishing a series on your blog is one of the best ways to “have an ace in the hole.” If you establish a certain day of the week that is focused on a specific subject, then you aren’t grappling with that aspect of writing.

This also helps your guest bloggers. It’s much easier to find someone to write on a specific topic than to just say “write anything.”

The best part of running a series is that your audience will return to see the next post in the series too. It’s a great way to build audience attention over time, once they become invested in the subject.

What do you do to keep from losing your blogging mind?

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Photo Credit: h.koppdelaney via Compfight cc