How can you convince other bloggers to link to your blog? They way that you usually do this is to, over a period of a month, make three to four really good comments that push the knowledge of the audience further than the comment in their blog posting. So if they just posted on XYZ topic, you go in and on your comment you add additional stuff and sign in with your name. No URL, no nothing else. Just with your name.
After you've done this four or five times then you pick up the phone, sort of an unused method these days, you pick up the phone and you call that blogger. You say "Hey, I follow your blog and I love the things you say. As you can see I've made a couple of comments." And you start talking about them and you comment on their blog. After you develop that personal relationship eventually you come back and say "I just wrote a really cool article that you may want to link to." For more information on how to make blogging work for your company, read "Business Blogging Results."
http://101publicrelations.com/bloggingresults.html?utm_source=prideas&utm_content=business_blogging_results

Posted by Dan at 07:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's a tip for using blogs for your business. Use other RSS sites to promote your blog. Basically an RSS aggregator is a program, and there are many of them out there that are really sort of cool, that goes out once every hour or so, and you can use it to automatically pull in RSS feeds from a bunch of different places for you to easily read whenever you want to. You just find a blog that you like and you just add it to your RSS aggregator. And then once every hour or so, your little RSS aggregator goes out, grabs all of the new content from this site and that corporate blog. It grabs them all and it brings them in and shows you the headline and maybe the first 20 words of that particular article. So you are able to, within a few seconds, get a quick overview of what is happening on all of these different sites and blogs and places that include an RSS feed, because RSS feeds don't just happen on blogs, they happen on a lot of news sites and even shopping sites.
And you can get a quick read of what's going on and instead of having to go to 10 different sites to see what's going on you can see them all at once right on your screen. And the best part is that producing an RSS feed is really sort of a cool technology that is built into most blogging packages. It becomes a snowball rolling down the hill. After a little while you couldn't turn off the traffic if you wanted to because it just keeps flowing in you because you've doing a good job of promoting it. And I will tell you very frankly, that one thing has done more to build my blogging business than anything else I have ever done, with the exception, possibly, of writing with a voice, as we talked about earlier. To find the top 40 places to promote your blog, read "Business Blogging Results."
http://101publicrelations.com/bloggingresults.html?utm_source=prideas&utm_content=business_blogging_results

Posted by Dan at 07:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Want to know how to make pinging on your blog easy? Here's what I do. Whenever I post I ping Yahoo's site. I'm getting technical here. If you don't understand what I just said, the book that we have referenced in the packet helps explain what pinging is and how all of that works. But basically what it's doing is telling certain engines "Hey I just did something new. Come and get it and put it in your search engine." So I ping Yahoo so Yahoo knows I've got something new and then I go and open my My Yahoo page and it grabs my content and pulls it in.
I have found that sometimes within 20 seconds, sometimes two days, Yahoo spiders arrive at the site and spiders the pages. And I oftentimes get those blogging entries into Yahoo within a matter of hours. Within 72 hours I'm in Yahoo with that post. I can't do that with a regular full-text newsletter archive page. Here's what I recommend that you do. I recommend that you ping www.PingOMatic.com. What Ping-O-Matic does is they gather all of these different places where you can do this pinging stuff. We're getting really technical and I apologize but pinging means that your computer tells some other computer someplace else that you did something new and they need to come get that. For more great ideas and information on how to make blogs work for your business, read "Business Blogging Results."
http://101publicrelations.com/bloggingresults.html?utm_source=prideas&utm_content=business_blogging_results

Posted by Dan at 07:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

How can you turn your newsletter into a blog? Basically what I do is I take a whole issue of a newsletter, I put it on a full-text newsletter archive page. Then from that I take each individual articles and blog them separately. The separately-blogged articles get higher search engine rankings and more traffic than the full-text newsletter archive page. In fact, right now, at the time of this recording, there is some very interesting behavior taking place. If you go out and look in a search engine oftentimes you will find that blog posts about someone's site are doing better than the site itself is doing in search engine ranking.
There are two specific advantages. The first one is unless you have an active content management system out there you can usually do it faster by posting it to your blog. The second one is that for some reason, and I'm not quite sure why, blogs are doing huge things right now with search engines. In most cases you will find the blogged version of an article in the search engines much more easily than you will find the same article as part of a standard newsletter archive that contains the entire text of the newsletter. For more great ideas and information on how blogging can work for your business, read "Business Blogging Results."
http://101publicrelations.com/bloggingresults.html?utm_source=prideas&utm_content=business_blogging_results

Posted by Dan at 07:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

How can you avoid getting into trouble with your business blog? You need to have some kind of editorial guideline out there just to keep you out of court. Especially if part of your personality in your particular blog is to comment on the industry. You need to make sure that you have some kind of control out there to keep you out of court. There will be certain areas that are forbidden. There will be certain styles that are forbidden. Now what I recommend is that you write a generic document that says "Here are examples of how to handle specific issues." And then you have a manager who approves blog entries before they go out, especially if you are in a highly regulated or a highly litigious industry.
My recommendation is that you do it this way - every day, whoever it is that is assigned as the company blogger, at 10:00 in the morning that person has no other meetings on the calendar because it's blogging time. That person has an hour that is their time to blog each day. At 11:00 the manager and/or the lawyer who has to approve it has set on their calendar a constant daily meeting consisting of reviewing the blog, approving it and publishing it. If you have it that way, where the lawyer or the manager is the person who actually converts the blog from a draft to a published entry then you never have any doubts over whether or not they reviewed it before it was publishedFor more great ideas on how to make blogs work for you, and keep you out of court, read "Business Blogging Results."
http://101publicrelations.com/bloggingresults.html?utm_source=prideas&utm_content=business_blogging_results

Posted by Dan at 07:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Are blog links good for business? When I write a really good blog post I get thousands and thousands of visitors to my site because all of the other sites that are simply aggregating content and pointing people to different places are all pointing at me. And I love those people. As I said, you should have that type of blog as one of your company blogs. But I also hesitate to say that should be your only company blog. When I send out newsletters, I have a blog where I actually republish the newsletter articles on the blog. It's almost an archiving function. I've been doing it for just under a year now.
What I have found is that I oftentimes get more traffic to the blog version of that than I get to the newsletter version. Not only does that give me a permanent presence for the articles that I write but it also gives people an alternative method of locating it because now they've got search engines that are linking to it as opposed to having to subscribe. It is also a great little selling tool. I tend to blog the way that I speak when I do professional presentations. I do some presentations where I get paid a lot of money to do these presentations. I really like those because they hand me a nice big check and I walk out of there happy. For more great information on how blogs can work for your business, read "Business Blogging Results."
http://101publicrelations.com/bloggingresults.html?utm_source=prideas&utm_content=business_blogging_results

Posted by Dan at 01:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What should you be writing on your company blog? First, I believe that one of the best things that everyone should be doing is reading the publications that your customers read.
Gather those together and have a year of their tables of contents up on a wall someplace, and look at the trends that are being consistently being talked about through published trade media for your particular industry. Those trends tell you what you should be blogging about. You can simply commentate on the industry. So if you go to the industry conference and hear all of the issues as they're brought out, you can sit in the back of the room and blog about those kinds of things and create tremendous value for the industry.
In fact, I have actually seen conference sessions where people in the audience were typing wirelessly or over their cell phone, watching the key blogs in the industry. Of course these are technology conferences, but watching the key blogs comment on what they're hearing in the session. I have seen the room erupt in laughter, and the speaker in the front is clueless as to what they are laughing about. And what everyone is laughing about is that someone who is sitting in the back row just blogged something that made fun of what the speaker just said.
For more great ideas on how to make blogs work for your company, read "Business Blogging Results."
http://101publicrelations.com/bloggingresults.html?utm_source=prideas&utm_content=business_blogging_results

Posted by Dan at 07:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wondering what to put in your company blogs? One of those blogs should be company news. This is where your press releases go. This is where you announce that so-and-so just got promoted. This is the boring stuff which has no edginess to it whatsoever. For ideas on what to put in your other blogs, read "Business Blogging Results."
http://101publicrelations.com/bloggingresults.html?utm_source=prideas&utm_content=business_blogging_results

Posted by Dan at 01:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What kind of personality will help your company blog? This blog is best if it is written by the CEO or ghost written for the CEO. But it is the CEO's voice. It's communicating the CEO's opinion about the company. It is designed to take the personality that the corporation wants to communicate to the world and communicate it on a regular basis. So if your corporate culture is "We wear white shirts, button down collars and red ties every day to work, and we wear our jackets at our desks." And if that's what you want to communicate, because, maybe you're a bank and you want to communicate staid, proper and precise, then your corporate personality blog is staid, proper and precise.
You want to have a personality that goes beyond corporate white-shirt buttoned down and into more "We care about you" that's a really good attitude to have in a blog. Or "We give you information that nobody else gives you." or "We look at the world in a different light." And here's where, in one or two paragraphs each time you blog, you can take the opportunity to comment on the world around you - usually about your industry - in a way that shows your corporate personality. For more great ideas on how to use blogs for business, read "Business Blogging Results."
http://101publicrelations.com/bloggingresults.html?utm_source=prideas&utm_content=business_blogging_results

Posted by Dan at 07:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

How can you blog without making your legal team freak out over your content? I have lived with legal sign-offs for years and it is one of the hardest elements of marketing. My recommendation is that. Here's the way that I look at legal counsel in marketing, it is counsel and it is to be taken that way. And so what I have learned over the years is that the best way to handle this is to go to the legal team and say "We need your most open-thinking lawyer to be on the blogging team." And then don't be willing to just give in to every single thing that they say. I will tell you that it's not unusual to have, should I say, heated discussions, in legal offices with the lawyers who say "You can't do this" and to hear a manager say "What are the ramifications if I do this?" and they say "It's this, this and this." And the manager then says "That's an acceptable business risk." And then they do it or don't do it.
The best way to handle this is to go to the legal team and say "We need your most open-thinking lawyer to be on the blogging team." For more great information on how to make blogging work for your company, read "Business Blogging Results."
http://101publicrelations.com/bloggingresults.html?utm_source=prideas&utm_content=business_blogging_results

Posted by Dan at 07:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

How can you get your blog into search engines? Go to www.Yahoo.com and set up a My Yahoo account if you don't already have one. In the new My Yahoo interface, click the link near the top (or the bottom) that says "Add Content." It will take you to a page where you see a prominent "Find" button. Next to it is a little link that says "Add RSS by URL." Click this link and it will take you to a page with detailed (yes, understandable) instructions for how to add an RSS feed to your My Yahoo page. Add the RSS link for your own blog and click the Add button. Click Finished. For more great tips on how to make blogging work for your business, read "Business Blogging Results."
http://101publicrelations.com/bloggingresults.html?utm_source=prideas&utm_content=business_blogging_results

Posted by Dan at 07:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's a great blogging tip. The key to success is to build your blog a strategy. A strategy for a blog starts with the message that you want to convey through your blog and how you want it to position you. Once you've decided your strategy, the tactics of how you can best communicate that strategy will naturally flow from that decision. And that's where the element of blogging style comes in.
One of the problems with many of the corporate blogs that I have seen is that they are boring. I look at them and think "Who in the world is ever going to read this?" And one of the challenges that flows from that situation is, since no one reading your blog, you get no return and it becomes a burden to write. And then all those other issues start to show their ugly heads. So that's the reason I wanted to start with your blog's strategy and style because oftentimes the selection and implementation of a good style is what makes it easier to be able to find time to blog and to convince your boss to allow you to do it. For more great tips on how to use blogs for publicity, read "Business Blogging Results."
http://101publicrelations.com/bloggingresults.html?utm_source=prideas&utm_content=business_blogging_results

Posted by Dan at 07:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's a great blogging tip. The key to success is to build your blog a strategy. A strategy for a blog starts with the message that you want to convey through your blog and how you want it to position you. Once you've decided your strategy, the tactics of how you can best communicate that strategy will naturally flow from that decision. And that's where the element of blogging style comes in.
One of the problems with many of the corporate blogs that I have seen is that they are boring. I look at them and think "Who in the world is ever going to read this?" And one of the challenges that flows from that situation is, since no one reading your blog, you get no return and it becomes a burden to write. And then all those other issues start to show their ugly heads. So that's the reason I wanted to start with your blog's strategy and style because oftentimes the selection and implementation of a good style is what makes it easier to be able to find time to blog and to convince your boss to allow you to do it. For more great tips on how to use blogs for publicity, read "Business Blogging Results."
http://101publicrelations.com/bloggingresults.html?utm_source=prideas&utm_content=business_blogging_results

Posted by Dan at 07:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What's one of the best tips for bloggers? Here is one of the things that I would recommend. Make sure as you do your blogging that you blog with search engines in mind. Structure your blogging comments so that they get highly ranked in search engines. Use compelling headlines that contain a keyword that people may search for your particular company with. Don't title a blog entry "Little Red Riding Hood's Lessons" title it "Personnel Management Lessons from Little Red Riding Hood." Something like that switches it entirely so all of the sudden your blog entries are able to generate search engine positioning for you.
If you happen to use MoveableType or one of the other blog software programs where you have control over it you may want to do things like put your title in as an

tag, and putting the title of the article as the title tag on the page. What I have discovered is that 17% of everyone who comes to the site comes in through the blogs. Remember back to the search engine comments? Because the blog entries do well in the search engines they are coming into the blog from the search engines. Of those 17%, 45% of them buy something through a link from the blog. And that is during that visit, not over time. So this means that my blog is the source of approximately 5% to 10% of my total business for that site.
For more great ideas and information on how to make blogging work for your company, read "Business Blogging Results."
http://101publicrelations.com/bloggingresults.html?utm_source=prideas&utm_content=business_blogging_results

Posted by Dan at 07:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

1. Assess whether you have anything of value to say – if you don’t really have anything to add to your industry or your customers, it’s probably not too wise to go out and create another blog.

2. Decide whether you are truly committed to building and maintaining an active blog – you certainly don’t want to start one without a commitment to continue building it.

3. Decide who will write your blog postings – it may be one person, or several, but if you don’t put someone in charge of actually writing the postings and coordinating the posting process, you’re probably going to fail. Put it in their job description, make it part of their performance review, maybe even create an incentive based on the blog’s performance.

4. Choose a blogging software program.

5. Create your blog

More details can be found at Blogging for Business

Posted by DK at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Most blogging packages come with a feature called RSS, which is a huge reason why businesses should have blogs.

The acronym RSS has two purported meanings. The one that seems most useful is “Really Simple Syndication.”

Syndication essentially means that the content of a RSS feed can be easily lifted and displayed by other sites and tools that have RSS reading capability built in.

RSS is a standard that makes that simple.

Here are some reasons why RSS feeds are useful.
RSS Feeds Can Be:
-Accessed with RSS aggregators
-Pulled into a web page for easy perusal
-Aggregated by the blog search engines
-Pulled from the aggregation engines into other people’s sites
-Pulled from multiple sites and aggregated on the fly at your site
-Used to offer items for sale from your catalog or other stores on your site
-Delivered to people in newsletter format

To learn more details about RSS feeds and syndicating your blogs, take a look at Blogging for Business.

Posted by DK at 09:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

1. Write with a voice.
Does everyone in your industry write like a bunch of lawyers or academicians? Does everyone carefully pussyfoot around, never calling a spade a spade? If so, step up and become the person who does things differently. In other words – make your writing interesting. It will attract a following.

2. Short and sweet is good, but so is long and impactful.
The blogging world is accustomed to short, 3-5 sentence posts. But many business bloggers have discovered great success in longer posts, often the equivalent of 2-5 pages if they are printed out.

3. Use your post titles as headlines designed to get people to read the entire story.
Blog post titles are a bit deceiving. To an inattentive mind, they may appear to be a place to summarize your entry. But in reality, they’re much more than that. Blog post titles are, in reality, a headline, just like in a newspaper story. And the primary purpose of a headline is to get people to read the story.

4. Use categories to sort your blog.
This makes it easier for people to find similar stories on your site, plus it gives them another archive for search engine purposes. Categories won’t show up in your initial blog index page, but will show up as part of the archiving process.

Find out more at Blogging for Business

Posted by DK at 01:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Finally, you blog’s all setup and ready to go. Now it’s time to start blogging!
But, a key question remains...What do I say? Here are a number of suggestions that have created successful results on business blogs.

Write about what your company does. Making off-topic posts is great, but do it on your personal blog. Confine your business blog to stuff that is of interest to your target consumer. There’s nothing that’s more disconcerting when you go to someone’s blog about machining parts and see the recipe for their mother’s killer potato salad.

Write about stuff that your company doesn’t do that your audience wants to know about. Think of your blog as a trade magazine. You serve a small portion of the needs of that audience, but they have needs for lots of other information to help them do their job. So give it to them. This is a great way to build credibility with your audience, return traffic, and relationships with others in your industry.

Write about the stupid things people do in your industry. This is another never-ending source of content for your blog. Take all of those times when you shake your head in (lack of) admiration for something someone’s done and blog about it. It’s guaranteed that if one person’s made that mistake, thousands more have too. You’ll give them tips that will help keep them from making mistakes, at the same time building your reputation.

Find out more blog-writing ideas at Blogging for Business

Posted by DK at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Most blogging software allows you to format a navigation area around the actual blog content with your own links, graphics, and marketing materials. There are several key elements that every business blog should include in their navigation section:

Links into the “money pages” of your website.
When I refer to money pages I mean the pages that make you revenue. Don’t bother with linking to your privacy policy, etc., focus your blog’s links on the pages where you earn money either directly or indirectly from visitors to that page

Advertisements for your specific products/services.
Remember that many, if not most of the people who will see your blog will enter your blog directly through a search engine listing, rather than entering through another page on your site. That means that they have no idea who you are, what you offer, and why they should buy from you rather than someone else. That’s why advertising for your set of products and services can be a great moneymaker on a blog.

Google AdSense advertising.
Google AdSense is a program that allows you to place advertisements on your page that earn you money each time that someone clicks on an ad. Google has developed a program that reads the page, figures out what that page is about, and then displays ads that are related to the subject matter of that specific page.

More suggestions can be found at Blogging for Business

Posted by DK at 08:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As you probably know by now, on the web, if you build it, they won’t come. You’ve got to promote anything you do on the web to generate traffic to your blog. We recommend the following steps to promote your blogging empire online:

Step 1: Write Several Excellent Posts
Promotion doesn’t do much good unless you’ve got something excellent to promote. So, the first thing you need to do is to sit down, and over the course of 3-5 days, post 3-5 excellent, highly informative and interesting posts to your blog. This gives you a content base once you start promoting, giving others a glimpse of what kind of blogger you will be as they make the decision whether they will link into your blog.

Step 2: Link Into Your Blog From Every Page On Your Website
Classical search engines love to discover new material by following links. In fact, one of the biggest myths on the web is that you should be regularly submitting your sites to the search engines. Most engines actually penalize you for doing that. The ideal site, in their mind, is one that lots of other sites have found and created links into.

Step 3: Submit Your Blog Into The Blog and RSS Search Engines
Most non-bloggers are unaware, but there is a whole network of search engines that focus on listing blog and RSS feed content.

For the top 50 places to list your blog, go to Blogging for Business.

Posted by DK at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the core elements of the blogging world is the tradition of bloggers commenting on and linking to other people’s blog posts. Indeed, if you look at many of the top blogs out there, you will see that the vast majority of their posts link into someone else’s blog entries or websites.

It’s like a snowball rolling down a mountainside. Most of the time it will stop on its own, but every once in awhile it will trigger other snowballs rolling, some of which start even more, and pretty soon you’ve got an avalanche on your hands!

What a great opportunity this presents! You can actually get other people to link into your blog, increasing your traffic, your notoriety, and your incoming links for the search engines.

The theory’s great – but what about the practice? How do you go about getting other people to link into your site?

The best way is to start by commenting on other people’s posts first, while continuing to write great, impactful, insightful posts of your own.

As you do this process repeatedly – commenting on the posts of others, and especially if you add value to their posts, eventually these other bloggers will begin to see your work and will start following your blog and cross-posting back to you. That’s when you know that you’re starting to arrive on the blogging scene.

Check out Blogging for Business to learn more useful tips.

Posted by DK at 07:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Blogs don’t have to be public. They can be on intranets, behind firewalls, and/or password protected. This, plus their ease of use, makes them a great source for internal communications, project tracking, issue resolution, etc. Here are a few ideas:

1. Set up a blog for each of your major customers. Your account manager for that account coordinates the blogging, and the customer is able to use the comment features on the blog to reply as part of the blog itself. Or, you can grant customers the ability to write their own posts to the blog.

2. Set up a Letters From The President blog for your employees – allowing quick and easy access to the most current and past letters from the president to your company’s employees. Because blogs are so easy, this is a great way for the President to be able to develop a stronger relationship with your employee group.

3. Create an Human Resources blog – reporting answers to questions, company picnic plans, benefit explanations, new hire announcements, etc.

4. Use blogs as internal knowledge management tools, enabling your people to record, communicate, and easily search the knowledge gathered throughout the company. Here’s an interesting case study on the subject:

Any of those ideas spark an idea for you? Get more ideas at Blogging for Business.

Posted by DK at 08:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Blogs are an incredibly easy and inexpensive way to publish on the web. The following points illustrate how blogging technology can help your business:

-Blogs are a great way to get your site noticed by the search engines - search engines love blog entries. Many people who have blogs have discovered that their blog entries are getting faster inclusion in the search engine, and more importantly, higher rankings on the search engines. Try it for yourself - you may be surprised!

-Blogs are a great way to position your company in the eyes of your customers, your industry, and the press. Blogs can be used to support whatever positioning you wish to achieve: superiority, innovation, playful, giving, environmentally conscious, etc.)

-Blogs convert into sales and profits – those companies who actively use blogs as part of their marketing program have discovered that blogs bring in more visitors to your website and that a high percentage of those who visit a blog, if properly influenced through that blog’s content, will actually buy from their company.

For more information about the advantages of blogging, check out Blogging for Business.

Posted by DK at 07:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There’s a trend that has swept the online world, which is only now becoming visible to most businesses. It’s called blogging.

A blog (short for weblog) is essentially a program that allows the user to log into a form, type in an entry, press submit, and to have what they typed immediately posted to a website for all to see.

In business terms, it’s a stripped down content management system, allowing quick and easy posting of content to the web.

And blogs are incredibly popular:

• It is estimated that there were 4.12 million weblogs, of which 1.4 million are “active” (meaning that they are frequently updated) as of September 2003 and that this number will more than double to 10 million blogs by the end of 2004.

• Google shows 35.8 million web pages that contain the term “blog”, plus 12.6 million that contain the term “weblog” and 2.7 million that contain the term “blogging”. That’s a lot of pages!

• While kids and young adults use most of the existing blogs, an increasing number of businesses are coming to understand the advantages of using blogs to communicate with their consumers.

So how on earth can a technology that has essentially been created and primarily used for personal use be advantageous for business? Find out more in Blogging For Business.

Posted by DK at 08:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here are 12 different things you can do with a blog to build business:

1. Community building – create a blog that presents a wide variety of information of interest to your customers, both about your company, your industry, your community and more.

2. A newsletter – write articles on a variety of isssues pertaining to your customers and industry and distribute it through your blog.

3. Company news – post new announcements, news stories, management changes, new capabilities announcements, etc.

4. Industry news – report on the latest happenings in your industry. This is a great way to generate daily visitors to your site. Plus, frankly, it’s a great way to be able to feature your company’s solutions to the industry’s issues through links into appropriate pages on your site as part of a report.

5. Media center – create different categories within your Media Center blog for
• Media Releases
• Bios of key company officers
• Downloadable file photos
• Key media contact indivduals
• Recent stories run about your company in the media
• Frequently asked media questions
• Fact sheets about your products, plants, services, etc.
• Sample suggested interview questions
• Recommended sources for additional industry information
• Etc.

Continue reading "Blogs - Business building tools!" »

Posted by DK at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

How many words should articles contain when you are writing them to be submitted to online article directories?

You want to write somewhere between 600-800 words, certainly no more than 900, and no less than 500.

Keep in mind this is an online strategy. People like short, quick information.

If it’s too short, less than 500, I have to question the quality of the article that you’re writing. Can you really express your expertise and provide helpful tips in an article that’s short?

If it’s too long, 1) The article portals don’t want it because it eats up too much of their space, and 2) It’s just simply too long. People don’t have the time to read long articles.

For more information on how to build your website traffic, your celebrity/expert status, and your bottom line, check out How to Submit Online Articles That Pull Traffic to Your Website

Posted by DK at 03:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the toughest things for many business bloggers is to think of things to write about. Here's a great technique that helps to generate ideas that are guaranteed to be of interest to your audience.

First, I believe that one of the best things that everyone should be doing is reading the publications that your customers and the others in your industry read.

Gather at least a year's worth of issues of those magazines (hopefully 3 years) together into one place to use as resource materials. Then make copies of their tables of contents and post them side by side up on a wall someplace. Look at the commonalities that you see between those publications.

These are trends that are being consistently being talked about through published trade media for your particular industry. So you can assume that either those trends are what your audience is interested in knowing about, or that your particular trade's media is suffering from mass delusion (somewhat unlikely).

Those trends should give you a pretty good idea of you what you should be blogging about. Of course, the more recent issues should be weighted more heavily in your analysis.

It's one of the most powerful tools you can use because you're being told exactly what people are interested in.

Want to learn more about how to write better business blogs with less effort while still ensuring that appropriate review and control procedures are in place to help keep your company out of trouble? Check out our new report Business Blogging Results: How To Create and Write A Blog That Builds Your Business.

Posted by DK at 05:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)