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Top Myths About Business Blogging

By Christian

Writing a business blog is a great way to promote your products or services. There’s no doubt about it. There are a large number of professionals and business owners from all different fields who are entering the blogging world, and understandably…they want to get results!

A big part of getting good results from your blog is simply writing consistently and creating content that is valuable to your readers over time. Truth be told, it’s not rocket science. Building a successful blog can give your business some very significant results. It just takes work. Like anything you build from scratch…it starts off very small and builds up over time. Eventually it will truly become a force to be reckoned with. It just takes time and diligence.

One of the biggest reasons many blogs are not successful is not because making them work is all that difficult. The reason is because most blog authors simply don’t stick with it and do the necessary work to get the results they want.

One thing that can help you stick with it over time is simply having a realistic perspective on what to expect when you launch your blog. I’ve come across a ton of misconceptions over time, and these seem to me to be the most prevalent. I hope that reviewing these Myths About Business Blogging will help readers know a bit more about what to expect.

Myths About Business Blogging

You can always make money from advertising. This really isn’t true. Unless by “money” you mean a few bucks a month. You need a lot of traffic to make any meaningful amount of money from advertising. A LOT of traffic. Most adveristing methods will pay out somewhere in the range of $1-3 per thousand visitors. I’ve tweaked Adsense modules to average $5 per thousand visitors, so if you’re getting 50,000 visitors per month…you’re making $250. If your blog is getting 50,000 visitors a month, you’re not going to be excited about $250 🙂
Blogging is easy. Blogging is simple, not easy. Many people approach blogging, unfortunately, with a traditional media mindset. In other words, they want to set something up and watch it grow, but they don’t want to tend to it much. The fact is that blogging is simple, and it doesn’t have to take all your time. But if you want significant results, you need to work on it a bit every day. It is that consistent effort and hustle that will make the difference. Think of all the millions of other websites out there. You have to stand out. The process is simple, but it requires consistent effort over time.
I can automate this sucker! We’ve all heard this before, and there are more tools out there now than ever before. Search engines and humans alike reward original and valuable content. Trust me, I’ve explored em all…automation is definitely doable. I could show you tools that will fill your blog up with awesome articles every day without you having to lift a finger. You will have an awesome looking blog that takes almost no time at all…and it will never go anywhere, because at the end of the day there are no short cuts. Tread lightly with any sales copy that claims to be able to make your blog or blog marketing automatic. Nothing replaces diligence and hard work.
This sounds like too much work. I don’t really need a business blog. One of the biggest mistakes is to assume that because you’ve not had a blog before, you don’t need one now. Your customers are online…you need to be here. Yes, it will take work, and you’ll have to learn some new things. But the alternative is not being here…where your customers are. The alternative is losing business more and more. There are no good alternatives to having a good blog for your business. You need one.
I should be able to have a thousand visitors a day or so within a few months…or any other completely arbitrary number you’ve pulled out of the air. Everyone wants a lot of traffic. It’s only natural. But the fact is that not every niche is a high traffic niche. That’s first off. Second of all, if you’re running a blog for a small business, especially a very small business like a home based operation, you likely don’t NEED a lot of traffic to meet your goals. Don’t get wrapped up in arbitrary numbers. Yes, Yahoo! gets 300 million visitors a month or so…you don’t need that much. I’ve had more than one very profitable site that gets less than 3,000 a month. It’s not always about high traffic. As more and more people get involved in internet marketing, and as it becomes essentially mandatory for all small businesses to have a strong internet presence, it’s less about volume and much more about high quality and creating value for your readers.

Trust me, you can do some serious damage with your small business blog over time. ROI is difficult to measure if not impossible, which is another hurdle we need to get over as business owners. We’re used to getting a fixed or predictable result with each marketing piece we put out. Blogging is marketing, but it’s more like networking. You’re contacting and communicating with your readers and customers through the use of this medium. This work, when you do it well, leads to more business coming your way.

As a business owner, you don’t demand a specific ROI from a social event in order for you to attend. You understand that getting out there and shaking hands, meeting people and talking about what you do is essential. You do it because it’s a good, necessary business practice. Blogging, likewise, is a necessary business practice.

How Much Time Should You Spend Blogging?

By Christian

Clearly, I talk to a lot of people about using a blog to market their business. One of the most common concerns expressed by business owners is that it will take too much time. It’s not too much of a secret that blogging can be a very, very powerful tool in your marketing plan. Here are some reasons why:

It’s highly cost efficient.
It enables you to reach a huge number of people effectively, personally and quickly.
It gives you the power to reach NEW customers that you would not have reached otherwise.
It makes possible NEW revenue streams that you may not have ever considered before.
It puts a powerful publishing tools at your fingertips…you can promote your business 24/7, as often as you want, and the cost doesn’t increase the more you use it.
A well-designed and maintained blog will establish you as an expert in your field, building credibility and trust with your audience, an invaluable asset to your business.

These are just a few ways that a blog is a highly recommended marketing tool for your business. So it’s easy enough for me to argue, can you afford NOT to have a blog? And that really should be enough. However, it’s reasonable to consider the time issue, because no tool is going to work for you if you don’t use it. In other words, a blog doesn’t write itself, and if you don’t do it, it’s not going to do you much good.

So, How Much Time Should You Spend Blogging?

Here’s the bottom line: you get out what you put in. The fact is that most highly successful blogs with an immense amount of traffic, making big money from advertising, etc…are powered by individuals (or even teams of individuals) who put a LOT of collective time and energy into the site.

Do you even WANT a high traffic blog…one that is considered to be highly successful by traditional standards? It’s an important question. Here’s why: I’ve argued from the beginning of this blog that high traffic is only one of many ways to make money with your blog. It’s very possible that promoting your blog doesn’t have to be a big deal at all. It’s very possible, in other words, for you to have a very successful business, make a lot of money and have a blog at the center of it all…powering a lot of your sales, without it having to be a very big time commitment.

It’s very important to have accurate expectations however. If you do not work your blog every day, build your community every day…if you do not moderate comments and respond to inquiries aggressively and promptly, and if you do not do these basics every day over time, it’s unlikely you’re ever going to have a blog that gets 100k visitors a month.

What Are Your Goals?

When considering how much time you want to commit to blogging, it’s important to consider what results you want to get from your blog. You can probably tell at this point that there’s not going to be a hard and fast rule about how much time it takes to be successful blogging. Simply, you need to do as much as is necessary to reach your goals. So what are your goals?

Do you want to have 100k+ visitors a month and make several thousand a month in advertising revenues? If so, you’re going to need to work it full time, period. Blogging is going to have to be your full time job. It doesn’t mean you cannot start part time and build up to that point, but to acheive that type of traffic, it’s going to require a concerted effort on your part.

Do you want your blog to simply serve as a powerful and convenient way for you to interact with your customers? Do you want to build a good, targeted list of customers over time and use your blog as a way of gaining market share, getting new customers and building your brand? All of this can be accomplished over time with only a part time effort. Let me be clear, it will still require a consistent effort over time. But it hardly needs to be something that consumes all of your time.

I believe most professionals and business owners fall into this latter category. Blogging can be an absolutely impressive and powerful way to extend your business and market your products or services. And it doesn’t need to take a lot of time.

What About You?

What are your goals? Do you have a blog already? How much time do you spend using your blog to market your business?

How to Use Twitter Professionally

By Christian

It’s fairly clear how Twitter can be cool for personal use, correct? Friends follow each other and communicate via 140 characters or less. It’s a slightly more social version of texting. When it comes to business, it gets more complicated, because we have sales goals. We want to sell things. We want to make money. So how can you use Twitter to make money?

Here’s the thing, if making money directly on Twitter is your goal, you will be best served to simply stay away. Twitter can absolutely be a big part of your internet presence, but direct money-making goals aren’t gonna fly in this arena. Sorry.

The Novice Approach

I understand there’s a lot of novices (some of them are just fools, but most simply don’t know what they’re doing) out there, and they’re setting up multiple Twitter profiles, blasting out direct sales messages all day long. Most of these sales messages contain affiliate links or links to sales pages they’ve created. Perhaps they’ve invested in some course that guaranteed them that by doing this they’d make $10,000 a month on Twitter. I don’t know. The point is that this is not the purpose of Twitter, and by doing this they’re only making themselves a nuisance. It’s like going to a huge party and instead of going inside to hang, these people flier everyone’s windshield and leave. It’s rude. It creates no value, only litter. And it does not create a professional impression for them or their company. Also, it’s not effective. All those fliers end up in the trash.

How the Pros Do it

So how do you conduct yourself professionally on Twitter when you’re trying to run a business? The key is to embrace the social aspect of this huge network of people. The fact is that most people on Twitter are good people. It’s a party, and you’re invited. This analogy of course has been used before, but it’s true. Don’t flier the cars, just go inside and have fun.

How can this possibly bring in more business? Since when is networking not a good way of drumming up business? It’s age old…it’s a legacy way of getting new business. It’s proven; it’s effective. It works! But you don’t walk into a networking function or a gathering of any kind and just start pinning your business card to everyone’s lapel. You talk to people. Your business is what you do all day. Trust me, it’s gonna come up! How many new people have you ever met in real life who didn’t eventually ask what you do for a living? It usually comes up in your first conversation. Twitter is the same. Don’t forget that social rules have not changed just because our modes of communication have evolved a bit.

The way you conduct yourself professionally on Twitter is the same way you’d conduct yourself at any other social event in real life. Very simple, I know. But simple is good, right? Social networking is a huge way to leverage and expand your internet presence, drive traffic to your site and get new business. Conduct yourself professionally, and you will do well.

How to Get Visitors to Look Forward to Your Emails

By Christian

If you want to make money online, it’s important to build an email list. Period. This is a fundamental way of building a conversation with your buyers. It’s important logistically, because with an email list you can communicate directly with a lot of people and make money doing it. It’s also important psychologically, because things start on your blog, but if someone signs up for your email list, they’re taking the next step.

It perhaps seems like a small thing, but the visitor understands that they don’t have to sign up for your list. It’s completely voluntary, and the fact that they’re choosing to sign up is of significant psychological importance. They’re moving down the sales funnel, and they’re moving your relationship to the next level.

Signing up for an email list a large commitment of course, but it DOES take a commitment. This person understands that they’re going to receive direct communication from you now, and they’re raising their hand as an interested prospect. In truth, it’s a huge vote of confidence in you. Don’t screw it up! It means that the person signing up for your list has found significant value in what you offer, and they want even more. Hopefully, you have something more to give them!

The key to getting people to look forward to your emails is to give them MORE than they expect

As usual, the principle of success here is fantastically simple. One rule I learned in sales is to always under promise and over deliver. If you do this, you will always create a positive impression on your subscribers. Follow these simple principles, and you’ll have your email readers hanging on your every word:

Give them time to miss you. In other words, don’t email too often. Everyone has a threshold. Even the best content can come in too quickly and be overbearing. I honestly think most professionals (even some of my favorite internet marketers included) email too often and if they emailed LESS, they would make MORE money.
Build different lists. Categorize your subscribers. This takes forethought of course, and it can be done a number of different ways, but the point is that when you send out a message, it’s important for it to be as targeted as possible. Sending out a single message to everyone on your list is one thing. Sending out a targeted message to a specific group of people for a specific reason is an entirely different animal. Which one do you think is more effective?
Give more. If you promised a report or an ebook or a premium of some kind in exchange for them signing up, make sure it is delivered promptly. Then, follow up a week later with ANOTHER free report or some gift that relates to the first they received. Repeat on occasion. Under promise, over deliver. Do you think this will get people checking their email to see what else they’re going to get from you? It will.
Make your email highly deliverable. This may seem like a no-brainer, but if someone doesn’t receive your email because it was blocked by their spam filter, it doesn’t matter how effective it would have been. They didn’t get it. So it’s important to take steps to make sure your messages are as deliverable as possible. I recommend checking your messages against this free email spam checker. Often, making some small change to your outgoing messages can make a big difference in how many people actually receive it. There is no way to ensure 100% delivery rate, but being mindful about what you’re doing pays off.
Do more than sell. Email lists are powerful sales tools. It’s true, and I recommend you sell things to everyone on your email list. It’s a great way to extend value, continue your conversation with your visitors and make money online, all in one step. But anything can be overdone. If all you do is hardsell people with every message, you will make sales, but you will also suffer from inordinately high opt out rates and low response rates. Concentrate on the quality of the dialog you’re building. You can use your email list as a means of conversation, getting people’s opinions on different product ideas, etc. The possibilities are endless, and with a little creativity, you can explode the effectiveness of your operation through email marketing, but only if you look at your email list as more than a sales tool. The double benefit of doing this is that it will make your sales efforts more effective as well.

10 Essential WordPress Plugins for Your Business Blog

By Christian

I don’t typically do technical stuff on this blog, because my focus here is the effective use of blogging and social media and how to monetize your business using these tools. In other words, I don’t usually concentrate so much on the technical side of things, because my focus is on sales principles and the human element of making money online. However, it seems appropriate for me to share with you what plugins I personally use on this site and which ones I consider indispensable for any business blog.

If you’re going to operate a blog for your business, efficiency, effectiveness and security should be top priorities. Use these 10 Essential WordPress Plugins, and you’ll be in good shape 🙂

All in One SEO Pack – this one is a classic. It’s one of the most downloaded WP plugins of all time and for good reason. It is a huge asset to your blog with regards to search optimization.
WP Super Cache – this one makes your pages load faster. Why the heck wouldn’t you use it?
Google XML Sitemaps – builds and maintains a sitemap and robots.txt for you automatically. It also lets Google know when it should visit your site again to index new content. “What’s a robots.txt?” you say? You need this plugin.
Login Lockdown – if you’re not too concerned with someone hacking your site, you obviously are not aware of how often blogs get hacked and how much damage they can do. One way they get in is by randomly trying passwords over and over again until they get through. It’s called a brute force attack, one of the most common types of attacks. This plugin shuts your login page down after 2, 3 or however many false attempts you feel should be the limit.
Redirection – It’s essential to think ahead. You probably won’t need this plugin right away if you’re just getting started blogging, but it’s inevitable that you will take a page down, rename a post or something that will break links. This plugin allows you to make sure that everyone visiting your blog lands on a valid page. A very cool tool.
SEO Smart Links – strong internal linking is good for SEO. This wordpress plugin allows you to attach specific words or phrases, and anytime they appear on your blog, they will automatically link to whatever page you designate. This is a great tool for quickly establishing a good internal linking structure. Get it.
WP-DB Manager – your blog is going to require ongoing maintenance. Database optimization and repair, backups, etc. This plugin gives you an easy way to do a lot of these things, and it automates most of it as well, saving you time.
SEO Friendly Images – Images can be your friend when it comes to search engine optimization. Especially if you use good alt tags on all your images. For me, it’s easy to forget to do this, and it takes a minute, so this WordPress plugin automatically does it for you. Another no-brainer as far as I’m concerned.
MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer – Pinging google and other directories when you produce new content is a good thing. WordPress does this automatically. The problem is that when you make a change to an existing post, WordPress pings em again. And when you make any other small change to your site, WordPress pings em yet again. Basically anytime you hit “save”, WordPress pings Google. This can get you blocked. Not a good thing. This WordPress plugin knows the difference between when you should ping search engines and when you’re just doing edits. This way, you’re getting all the exposure you need, and you’re not abusing the system. A lot of bloggers don’t even know about this. It’s a very good tool.
Google Analytics for WordPress – having some type of analytics program installed on your site is essential for anyone serious about getting results from their business blog. There are other more robust alternatives. Google analytics is definitely not the holy grail of analytics utilities. However for me it is the best, because it’s free and it gives me everything I need. I’m not going to spend all day analyzing my web traffic. I want a really good snapshot of what’s going on…where people are coming from, my most visited posts, etc. Google Analytics gives you this and more, and it’s free. As far as I’m concerned it’s the best analytics application out there for business bloggers, and this plugin makes installation a snap.

If you’ve been involved with using WordPress for any length of time, you will likely have heard of all these before. My personal take is to keep plugins to a minimum. I like to run as lean as possible with plugins, because the fewer you have, the fewer things can go wrong. I prefer to spend as much time as possible on content and networking…and as LITTLE time as possible on design and coding, etc. Technical stuff is not for me, although I’ll learn whatever I need to learn to get things working smoothly.

That said, a handful of plugins, like what is on this list, will save you a lot of time, make your business blog more secure and much more effective for both your visitors and for search engines.

All these plugins are available for download at no charge by visiting the WordPress Plugins page.

100 Awesome Blog Tips Articles to Take Your Blogging to the Next Level

By Christian

recommended-blog-tips-articles — These recommended articles will give you all the blog tips you need to get your blog off to a powerful start 🙂

These are articles I’ve read recently that I found particularly valuable. They are all from blogs I read regularly. As someone who writes a blog, I know it is also essential to read a lot of blogs. I get questions from professionals and business owners about how to get started blogging, and this is always one of the first things I say: read blogs!

This is the number one way to learn what works, what doesn’t and what YOU want to write about. I recommend anyone interested in blogging should spend a month or so just reading other blogs. Subscribe, comment, spend some real time. Do this specifically in the space you want to occupy. For example, if you want to write a blog about real estate in your particular market area, search people up and find out who’s already active in your niche. Subscribe to their blog, comment them, read plenty of articles. Take note of the design of their sites. Who is hosting these sites? What things do you like, dislike, and what can you improve upon?

Spend time reading, paying attention first

Spending time reading and interacting on other blogs will help you develop your own blogging voice, and your own blogging voice is one of the most essential elements to any successful blog. For my own personal space, I obviously read a lot about blogging itself. Throughout my research I’ve accumulated a lot of awesome blog tips I’ve been wanting to share with you. I wanted to take one post and really link up a lot of my favorite fellow bloggers, and share with you some of the best blog tips I’ve come across that I think will motivate, educate and/or inspire you.

Blog tips, education, motivation

Some of these are great, educational posts. Some are motivational, and some are great resources to help you get started and be successful with blogging and social networking for your business. This list will direct you to some really solid ideas about how to get great results from your blogging and social networking. It’s guaranteed to get your creative juices flowing! Take time, do the work. Get started right now! And don’t forget to let me know how these articles have helped you!