Successful Blog

Don’t Build Your Business Castle on Another Guy’s Land

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How to blog series

Content Is King

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When building an online presence for a business, people quickly think of a website, social networks like Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, and Google+ — all of which, when put together, can seem overwhelming. Add in a blog to the mix and often people will flinch. It’s reasonable that growth-focused businesses might worry about the commitment and time that a blog could represent.

Still, whenever I’m invited to help a business connect to their customers and grow their community, a blog is always central to the content strategy. Content attracts, informs, demonstrates, and establishes value. There’s a reason online professionals say, “Content is king.”

Don’t Build Your Business Castle on Another Guy’s Land

All of the social sites might seem to replace the role of a blog. Twitter allows us to connect, converse, reconnect, faster and easier. Facebook and Google+ allow us to be social with our customers. LinkedIn is the Chamber of Commerce online. Instagram and Pinterest give us a chance to share what we see and like.

But if you want to the search engines working for you, a blog is a cornerstone to reaching those goals.

Have you read the terms of service on those social sites where you’re putting your advice, your expertise, your unique content? Would you keep your address book, your contact lists, your communication records inside another guy’s business?

It’s hard to have a true presence, if everything you say is on social sites. How to people know which place you call home? Where do you put your serious thoughts? What home holds your business body of work?

Your business blog content is the cornerstone of your business online. Well thought and well presented content is easiest, fastest, and most meaningful way to share your expertise. Helpful (not hypeful) insights, how-tos, and information that’s relevant to your customer’s lives is an invitation to get to know your business beliefs, values, and business sense. Content like that attracts people you want to work with, and give search engines valuable pages to index. Those indexed pages advertise you whenever people search for the solutions you write.

Don’t put something as valuable and attractive as content on another guy’s url.

If you’re going to build and share online content, own the url where you house it. Instead of writing a post on a social site write it on your business blog. Share the link and an excerpt on that social site instead. Keep the original content on your own URL – where Google and your visitors can connect it to your business.

Let the traffic and the authorship come to you.

Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Google+ and the rest make it easy to build groups and share content quickly. But what are we risking by building a following in places where we don’t own the “land”? The social site “landowner” is gaining benefit of every customer you attract. If you decide to leave, you might lose your whole list.

Who can trust that the social site sill never change the “rules”? Are you willing to risk your business on that?

Free isn’t free when you think about it.
Go visit instead and invite folks back to where you’ve build a location that looks, feels, and interact with them in a way that only your own property can. Content is king. Don’t build your castle on another guy’s land. You might find that you can’t get to the castle one day.

How would your business be affected if Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, or Google+ lost the content and connections you’ve built?

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

What Makes a Link-Worthy Blog?

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Tara Hornor

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What Does Link-Worthy Mean?

When creating a blog, it is essential for the content on the blog to be link-worthy. What does link-worthy even mean? It’s a standard you should consider for every single post — link-worthy means that your content is good enough that site visitors would want to bookmark your page, share with friends, or use as a reference piece on their own blog. It means that your blog will build a great amount of backlinks, and thereby increase its visibility online. When people link to you, your site receives many benefits from added social credibility to search engine boosts and more.

To ensure that your blog and its content are linkable, focus on writing about topics that truly interest you as well as your visitors. Some people dive right in to creating a blog without focus and then end up short of the success they hoped for because they were not fully dedicated to a specific topic or niche.

Key to Link-Worthiness: Passion

Starting with a topic you’re passionate about will help you to keep your blog up-to-date with quality content — content to which others will create backlinks. If you love a topic or know a whole lot more information than other people know, use that to your benefit and write about the topics you love and know best. In doing so, you are teaching what you know and sharing your passion about it. Offer content that is informative and useful that connects your passion to others, and people will be linking to you.

So make sure you love what you write about first and foremost. This will drive the rest of the content generation and energy behind your blog. When you’re excited about a topic, you’ll go the extra mile to make the post amazing.

Always before you hit “Publish,” ask yourself, “Is this the kind of resource that I would want to revisit?” If not, what’s missing? What extra bit of information would take it over the top? Now go add it to your post!

Setting Your Blog Up for Success

When your blog is set up in a professional manner, you are more likely to have success. The following is a list of a few aspects you need to consider:

  • Choose a domain name for your blog that is professional, catchy, and easy to remember.
  • Choose a blog layout or template that matches up with the content and is visually appealing.
  • Offer only original content on your blog. nIf you quote someone be sure to link to their work.
  • Write with a friendly and conversational vioce because that is what people tend to look for.

Promoting Your Link-Worthy Blog

Other people are the most important part of helping you build a blog that is linkable. Many well-established blogs already have strong readership. Owners of these popular blogs know to look around to see what other bloggers have been saying about them. If you are write about them and link to their work, you can easily get noticed by these bloggers and sometimes in return, they may link to you. This means more success for you because links from established bloggers often carry more google juice which can raise your visibility and help you to become more established too.

Guest blogging is also an ideal way of building a link-worthy blog. As a blogger, you can offer to guest blog on other well-established blogs and instead of being paid, you can ask that the blogger link to you. That link back will ultimately help you establish credibility with search engines and increase traffic to your blog. With more traffic, you will find people who are following your blog on a daily basis because they are so interested in what you have to say.

So how do you make sure that your blogs are link-worthy?
Do you have a specific set of ideal pieces of content you always try to provide?

Author’s Bio:
Tara Hornor writes about marketing, advertising, branding, web and graphic design, and desktop publishing for PrintPlace.com a company that offers online printing for print marketing media. Find her on Twitter as @TaraHornor .

 

6 Steps to a Business Blog that Attracts Customers

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How to Blog Series

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Marya Jan

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Small Business Owners Can Make a Blog a Customer Magnet

Do you have a business blog?

Or, do you feel like rolling your eyes when people tell you to get one?

Who reads a business blog anyway? Aren’t they places where business owners talk about their star employees, new products in the pipeline, latest on advertising efforts, and publish other bits and pieces of information that nobody cares about.

In other words, they publish incredibly boring stuff.

Well … not necessarily.

And it doesn’t have to be that way for you either.
Your blog can be a customer magnet.
Don’t you want to bring more customers to you?

6 Steps to a Business Blog that Attracts Customers

Here are six small steps you can take right now to ensure that you never go down that path – path that leads to boredom and ultimately abandon of your site. These are six steps to a small business blog that draws customers closer to you.

#1 Publish non-promotional content

The first thing you can do is stop promoting your products and services on your blog. Really, trust me on this. Your blog is not the place to that. Your website is, your online catalogue is, not your blog.

People don’t sign up to hear from you if all they are going to hear about your fabulous products – which no doubt, they are. People sign up because you post some interesting and engaging content that they don’t want to risk missing any of it.

For instance, I subscribe to my son’s speech pathologist’s business blog. Yes, she has one, and a fantastic one at that. (My son has Asperger’s Syndrome so he needs help with social skills and pragmatics.)

I have signed up to her blog because she routinely publishes stuff about what’s new in the world of ASD therapies. She recommends great resources, and what’s happening around town. She highlights successes of her other clients (with permission, of course). She tells parents quick tips that we can follow at home.

What a great blog she has where she publishes such useful content that people who can’t even afford her services now, sign up. And they might eventually, in future.

#2 Offer a freebie for email opt-in

Speaking of signing up, the whole purpose of blogging is to capture first time visitors email addresses straightaway, before they leave your site and forget all about you.

It really helps if you offer them some incentive – an ethical bribe if you may. My son’s speechie has got a 7 page report on how to find the right speech therapist for your child and when to do it. Indirectly plugging her service? I don’t really care, the tips are solid.

Think about if, if you have a child who doesn’t speak at age 3, would you not opt-in for information from a credible source?

Offer a freebie, and turn your blog into a lead generation machine. Psst … that’s the why you are blogging anyway.

#3 Publish content regularly

This is a topic of hot debate. But before you start freaking out, understand that your business blog is different from those huge blogs that everybody on the planet seems to follow.

Often, they have teams producing content for them, and either they are news sites masquerading as blogs, or blogs who grew big over a period of time. The owner usually monetizes them by placing advertising on them do they need an infinite number of visitors and hits to their site. Hence, they often update multiple times a day.

Your blog is different; you can get away with updating once a week. That is what I do and it works for me.

#4 Make yourself human & position yourself as an expert

Are you a huge company or a small business? I am thinking the latter.

While you may not have a really corporate voice on your website, it will still pay to come across as a living, breathing human on your blog.

You get to engage with your readers, who could possibly be so impressed with you that they will eventually buy from you.

Even if you don’t, isn’t it a good feeling to show your human face and just chill?

Like Sonia Simone of Copyblogger says, create Know, Like and Trust on your site. Get people to know and like you by being approachable and talking about your company’s mission. Post content that will get them to trust you.

And let’s not forget that we only buy from people we know, like and trust.

#5 Give your blog an audit

If you already have a business blog, give it a cold, hard look. If this blog was written by somebody else, would you subscribe?

Is it easy to navigate or feel cluttered? Does it look professional in its appearance?

Think about what sort of content are you publishing. Think about the frequency and length. Really think about the headlines. Which brings us to our final point; writing to earn people’s attention.

#6 Write like an A-list blogger

And lastly, do you know why most business blogs stink?

It’s because they person doing blogging has no clue how to blog in the first place. Blogging is a genre in itself, and in order for you to get people interested in your content, you must do as the Romans do.

Make your posts screen friendly and easy to read. Make them scannable using subheadings, bullets, bold and numbered lists, in the body of the post. Refrain from using long paragraphs. Make them short to really break up the text.

Keep your posts short – aim for a length of 500 words. You can write that in an hour. Think of this time as an investment in your business. Or, if you can’t spare a single minute, hire a freelance blogger.

Author’s Bio:
Marya Jan is a proud content creator for Open Colleges, (an education provider with awesome business and writing courses. When she is not busy blogging for them, she can be found helping small business owners revamp their blog content at Writing Happiness.

Sun Tzu and the Art of Strategic Blogging

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Mark Blasini

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As any content creator knows, creating and maintaining a successful, engaging blog is a huge challenge. Bloggers are constantly plagued by the question: “How do I attract more readers and keep them coming back?” The answer to this question may lie in a two thousand year old text on military strategy — The Art of War, by the ancient military general Sun Tzu.

Sun Tzu and the Art of Strategic Blogging

Most people are familiar with Sun Tzu and his principles of deception and strategy. Many leaders, from Napoleon to Patton to top CEO’s in the country, use his wisdom to create successful empires. However, what most people don’t know is that these same principles lend great insights into how to create and maintain a successful blog. These principles make up what I call “strategic blogging.” I list them as follows:

  1. Follow your Way. For Sun Tzu, a strong general inspires his troops by leading them towards a single mission or vision — a spiritual goal that makes the fighting and hardships they must endure meaningful. This vision is what Sun Tzu calls “the Way.” Likewise, as a strategic blogger, you too must have a unique vision for your blog. What is it specifically that you want to accomplish with your readers? Do you want to inspire them? Educate them? Change their thinking or lifestyle? Whatever your vision is, the Way of your blog should always be geared towards helping readers create a better life for themselves.
  2. Know your audience and yourself. Sun Tzu writes: “Know your enemy and yourself and victory will be certain.” As a strategic blogger, you need to know who your audience is, what their needs are, and how you can best serve them. Are you writing for artists? Other bloggers? Entrepreneurs? Marketers? What information are they specifically looking for? What writing style are you strongest at (informative, personal, funny, reflective, etc.)? Find your natural style, find topics that your readers will be interested in, and go blog. Simple, yet direct.
  3. Avoid the strong, attack the weak. Sun Tzu says: “Just as the flow of water avoids high ground and rushes to the lowest point, so on the path to victory avoid the enemy’s strong points and strike where he is weak.” As a blogger, your content should be directed at hitting the audience where they are weakest — their uncertainty. In other words, it’s pointless to try to make someone aware of something that he or she already accepts as true — just as it’s equally pointless to try to convince someone of something he or she is dead against. Your best bet is to focus your message on what your audience is uncertain or neutral about.
    For example, let’s say you’re an environmentalist blogger and you want to blog about different ways and reasons for going green. While most people agree that going green is good for the environment, they aren’t willing to disrupt their lives in order to do so. So providing information from the standpoint of how going green will “save” the environment will most likely not be effective. Instead, you must strike where people are weak: their self-interest. Most people know that going green is good, but what they don’t know is how going green will benefit them. Fortunately, going green is more a matter not of what you do, but of what you don’t do, or stop doing. The focus of the blog, then, could be showing people ways in which eliminating pollution-creating behavior (e.g. using the car, running the electricity, etc.) actually saves them money. This fulfills your goal of educating people while giving your audience a clear, strong benefit.
  4. Use deception. Let’s face it: your goals and your audience’s goals, at some point, diverge. Your audience wants to be either educated or entertained. You want more subscribers (or e-book sales, or speaking opportunities, etc.). Thus, in order to achieve your goals, you have to practice deception. As Sun Tzu tells us, “Deception is the Way of warfare.” Deception doesn’t mean “lying.” As a blogger, you should always be honest with your followers. This is how you build trust, rapport, and long-term relationships. Deception simply means hiding your objectives in such a way that you lure your target to help you achieve them.
    For example, in the content marketing world, we use the 80/20 rule when it comes to providing content vs. selling: you should do 80% content, 20% selling. This means that only after you have provided valuable content should you provide a message concerning how your audience, by subscribing/purchasing/contacting, can better be helped. At the end of relevant posts, you should include a italicized message stating how you can help your audience further: “Want to know better ways to save money by going green? Purchase my new e-book…” Remember, though: only sell if you’ve provided valuable content. Your content is what is going to lure your audience — not your selling.

While these principles are by no means the end-all, be-all of strategic blogging, if you follow them consistently, I promise you will achieve incredible results. Now go out and establish your blogging empire!

Author’s Bio:
Mark Blasini writes about music, art, and creativity at www.DarkLion.com. He is the author of the free e-book Light the Fire: Six Simple Principles for Creating Art That Inspires, downloadable if you subscribe to his site. You can find him on Twitter as @TheProfMusic.

5 Powerful Tips For Writing Irresistible Headlines

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How to Blog Series

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Ali Abbas

Do you want more people to read what you write?
Do you want more subscribers to your blog?
Write irresistible headlines!

It’s that simple.

5 Powerful Tips For Writing Irresistible Headlines

Writing headlines is a craft; practice, and practice more to sharpen your skills.
In addition to practice, read about writing headlines regularly to make sure your skills don’t get rusty.

This post offers 5 powerful tips about crafting headlines. You might already know some of these, but one or two will surely make you slap your forehead. Others might sound absurd. But believe me they will go a long way if you employ them.

1. Write the headline first

The temptation is to write the headline after you’ve written the whole piece. Why not – you can write a better headline when the copy is there in front of you, right?
Wrong!

Headline is a promise.

You make promises before you fulfill them. Your headline is the same.
If you save the headline for last, after writing the monstrous copy, you’ll want to write the darn headline quickly and be done with it. That’s not how to blog effectively.

If the headline doesn’t get the required attention, it won’t bring the desired results — the people who are perfect for what you offer.

2. Highlight the biggest benefit

Most readers don’t come to find out what you do or why you do it. They are interested in things that make their life easier and better, save them time, make them money, make them healthy or beautiful.

Tell readers in the headline what your text will do for them.

3. Length doesn’t matter

Many so-called gurus preach that shorter headlines work better.
Nonsense!

14-word headlines can get as much readership as 3-word headlines.
Length isn’t as important as getting your message across.

It, however, is better to keep the title under 70 characters (including spaces) on the internet. Longer titles get truncated by the search engines which can ruin your most powerful headline.

4. Don’t try to be tricky

Don’t try to be over smart when writing your headlines. Hundreds of thousands headlines are competing against you. Readers are too busy to figure out what the heck you are trying to say with unfathomable mumbo jumbo. They will simply click another link — one with a clear benefit.

5. Don’t write incomplete headlines

I had a personal experience with this a few days ago.

Traffic was jammed and I, being bored to death, was looking indifferently at the surroundings. My eyeballs got fixed at two advertising posters of rival two telecommunication companies, posted on wall end-to-end. Their headlines read as follows:

I. The Treasure (Say by Company A)
II. Make Free Calls For The Next 24 Hours (Say by Company B)

I ignored the first headline wondering “a telecom company and treasure, what the heck” and the traffic had just started to move slowly, so I didn’t have the time to read the rest of the ad.

The second headline was imprinted on the back of my mind. Later on, I came to know that the Company A offered better value, but by then I had already purchased the services of company B.

Never use headlines that require reading the rest of the advertisement to be understood. Readers will quit at that very point. They have no reason to read on. Readers on the internet read too quickly to keep on reading to find out what you are trying to say.

What it all boils down to is…

To apply the marketing wisdom of P.T. Barnum:

“You can’t please all of the readers all of the time; you can’t please even some of the readers all of the time, but you really ought to try to please at least some of the readers some of the time.”

The sole purpose of a headline is to attract people who are most interested in your offer. Follow these 5 powerful tips for writing irresistible headlines. Ignoring them is simply wasting your time as well as money. Prove it to yourself!

What rules do you follow when writing headlines? Share in the comments.

Author’s Bio:
Ali Abbas is a freelance writer and blogging enthusiast. At the Writers Blog (), he shares his innovative ideas for starting a real, sustainable and profitable online writing career. To learn more about writing headlines, download his FREE Report: Secret Ingredients To Writing Killer Headlines That Always Get Noticed.

What Makes a Successful and Outstanding Business Blog? 20 Links to 100s of Tips and Tools

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How to blog series

How to Blog as Business Strategy

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In 2006, as a professional blogger, I established a NEW Blogger Page on Successful-Blog. I filled it with links to resources and advice for people starting a new blog. Yet, as my blog and my business kept growing and changing, the New Blogger Page moved to the background of what I did. Social media networks needed exploring. SOBCon and my own business were growing. New clients were taking the time I used to have for keeping the page in it’s most updated condition.

Yet my blog still supports me and my business endeavors, especially as content strategy, content marketing, and content management have all become critically important to every business. So I’ve decided to reinvest in the New Blogger Page with an eye how blogs fit with Successful Online Business Strategy today. I’ve read through the original links and spent hours researching more. Every link included is here because the content is important to succeeding.

New beginnings inspire and energize me.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be publishing new blog posts filled with resources for successful and outstanding bloggers today. This post is the first in that series.

20 Deep Content Links for Successful and Outstanding Business Bloggers

Whether you work at home, run a small business, or work for a 100,000 person corporation, if you’re about to begin blogging for business or just want to improve your efforts, earning and staying up with the tools, process, and vocabulary of blogging can be daunting. Having a survival kit of support resources to get your first words published can make that new beginning easier, faster, more meaningful and more lasting.

BigStock: I’ve pulled together these 20 Deep Content Links
that lead to hundreds of ideas, examples, and resources
to answer What Makes a Successful and Outstanding Business Blog.

Great Business Blogs to Read

Great bloggers read great blogs. Here’s where to find some to use to determine your own standards, to see what works with your potential audience, to begin relationships with other bloggers in your niche by commenting on their blogs.

  1. Understanding and Reading a Blog (for Newcomers) This entry is timeless, relevant content from John Dvorak..
  2. How to organize and read the blogs you like Setting up an RSS Reader
  3. 10 Top Business Blogs and Why They Are Successful
    SocialMedia Examiner highlights 10 Great Business Blog Models
  4. Top 50 Business Blogs by BlogRank
    Invesp.com’s deep blog rank directory built on a 20 criteria algorithm
  5. Blogging Business
    Best business blogs selected by Fast Company
  6. 10 Essential Business Blogs You Should Be Following
    FastupFront recommends 10 Great Business Blogs

What Makes a Successful and Outstanding Business Blog?

Advice from Successful and Outstanding Business Bloggers to share the culture, the best practices, and the “rules.”

  1. The Secret to a Successful and Outstanding Blog
    What made this blog successful.
  2. 101 Tips from 50 Small Business Bloggers
    AMEX Open Forum asked 50 of the Best
  3. “Online or Offline, this is the Key to Success.”
    The key ingredient via Chris Garrett.
  4. How to create a great website
    Website or blog, the principles are the same. Seth knows what he’s saying.
  5. 8 Top Pro Bloggers Answer One Important Question
    John Paul Aguiar asks What is the One thing bloggers need to do today to succeed that they didn’t have to do in the past?

    6. There are a multitude of definitions for success and many ways to define blogging.

  6. How to Build a Somewhat Successful Blog: 16 Lessons I Have Learned from the Positivity Blog
    Pay attention to success reported by smart bloggers in their first year.
  7. What Makes a Blog Successful?
    Readers know a lot about what makes a good blog tick.
  8. How to Build an Authority Blog: Tips from the Experts
    Understand what works. A successful blog is more investment than luck.
  9. What Really Makes A Successful Business Blog?
    Are you there to build your opportunity or to help people build theirs?
  10. How to write a successful business blog
    techradar with specific tips for successful business blogs
  11. 5 Reasons Why Business Blogs Fail
    A Checklist worth noting from Lee Odden’s TopRank Blog
  12. 7 Fatal Business Blogging Mistakes (And Easy Fixes!)
    Mistakes most every business blog makes
  13. Building Blocks for a Successful Business Blog
    by Better Business Blogging
  14. Drive a High Performance Blog and Watch Your Numbers Go Up
    The right fuel with the right driver can take a great blog to performance numbers that hit the top

After 5000+ blog posts, I can say this for certain …
If you don’t have a blog in your business strategy, your strategy has a gaping hole.
You’re missing a chance to connect with customers around your deepest and most useful expertise. You’re working right past the opportunity to show customers how you can make their work and their lives easier, faster, and more meaningful.

Easier, faster, more meaningful are irresistible.

Be irresistible
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

More updates to come.