If you’ve been following the posts on this blog, or have set up your business blog as per our step-by-step video tutorials on how to set up a blog, then it should be pretty clear by now that the only work you have to do as a business blogger is to keep writing about your business and posting it on your blog.
In previous posts I have listed some of the many topics you can write about – all of which are designed to help you build trust with potential new customers by educating and informing your blog readers about the benefits of your products and services and why they should be doing business with you instead of your competition.
Now, whenever I talk about this with other small business owners, most of the responses I get tend to fall into two main categories:
1) “I don’t have time / I’m too busy”
2) “I don’t know how to write”
Business owners, small business owners and micro-business owners listen up!
I recently set up a Google AdWords pay-per-click campaign to bring more visitors to my “How To Start A Blog” video tutorials product.
Setting up an effective Google AdWords campaign is a fairly comprehensive subject. I do run very successful and highly profitable Adwords campaigns for a few select clients – if you are interested in knowing more about my PPC services or discussing setting up a PPC campaign for your business, feel free to contact me here. If you just want to learn more about Pay-Per-Click advertising, then I recommend you get Perry Marshall’s The Definitive Guide To Google AdWords.
What I do want to talk about in this post, is how to use data from your online advertising campaigns to grow your business blog organically. In other words, how to go from paying for traffic to getting visitors coming to your blog for FREE.
The concept is actually very simple:
Set up advertising banners or text ads to drive visitors to your website, e-commerce store, product sales page, etc …
Make sure you can track which keywords visitors are searching for – not only the keywords and keyword phrases people are using to find your ads, but more importantly, the keywords and keyword phrases that get them to click on your ads in order to get to your site, and especially the search terms that end up converting visitors into buyers.
Write content on your business blog based on the specific keywords and keyword phrases above that convert searches into sales of your products and services.
“The Lowdown – Blogging For Business” is a great audio book for anyone thinking about starting a blog for promoting their business or for those who already have a business blog and want to know how to get the most benefit from business blogging.
As the audio book publishers state on their introduction, this audio book about business blogging is for people who are long on ambition but short on time, and offers great tips and tools that will keep you ahead of the game in creating and running your business blog.
“The Lowdown – Blogging For Business” by James Long and narrated by Lorelei King is a one hour long unabridged audio book recording published by Creative Content Limited and available as a downloadable MP3 file.
Here’s what the publishers have to say about this business blogging resource:
“On the internet, you never know who might become a customer. It’s important to put your best foot forward when crafting an internet presence.
If you are a small business, chances are that you are most likely very familiar with the “feast or famine” cycle that most small business owners go through, where there’s either too much work going on for you to handle it all, or not enough business coming in through the door.
As a small business coach, I’ve seen too many small business owners simply shrug their shoulders at this, seemingly convinced that this is the way small business works. On a few occasions, I’ve been able to prove some business owners wrong on this point, after working extensively with them for several months, helping them implement systems to ensure that their business always had an active prospecting pipeline going, and allowing the business owners themselves to step back from the day-to-day activities of the business in order to perform more entrepreneurial work, such as growing their market share in a certain area, or identifying new business opportunities brought about by changes in business laws and the economy.
Transforming a typical small business from a “people-dependent” operation into a systems-driven enterprise, however, requires a significant investment of time and effort, and a deep commitment by the business owner to the process of releasing control over most aspects of managing the business.
If your business seems to be affected by the “feast or famine” cycle, then I want to show you an easy, smart, simple, quick and inexpensive way to start alleviating this condition.
In an earlier post I talked about setting up a community business blog for an organization, group, business network, church group, etc. This is useful if you want to set up a blog with multiple contributors. You can then assign each registered user a different status, like ‘blog author’ (can only post, but not edit), ‘blog editor’, and so on.
Recently, I was contacted by a client asking me if they could add a business directory to their site, in order to give each of the members of their business network a business listing.
Knowing that WordPress developers have created thousands of plugins for the blogging community, I went online and typed “business directory wordpress plugin” into Google.
The WordPress Business Directory plugin is described by its developers as being “an easy way to host a free directory page for your readers, affiliates, advertisers, community or club members … Listings include company name, a short description, and contact information including a live URL. The plugin includes an admin tab that allows you to approve of listings before they appear live on the site. You can also edit and delete listings.”
As every blog-savvy internet marketer knows, you can actually start a business blog for around $15.
So why did I title this post “How To Start A Business Blog For Less Than $100″?
Well, for a start, many (if not most) small business owners are not internet marketers – they’re full-time business owners who don’t have the time to keep up with the growing volume of information on the web about internet marketing related topics like search engine optimization, affiliate marketing, opt-in list building, pay per click management, and so on. And they don’t want to learn technical stuff outside of their area of expertise.
So … although it’s true that anyone can start a business blog for around $15 (I explain how to do this further below), what most business owners would end up with if they did this, is a default blog that isn’t really going to do much at all to help them grow their business.
Let’s face it … it doesn’t matter what business you’re in, if you think the competition for your products or services is bad “offline”, try taking your business online with the aim of actually getting some of that “multibillion dollar” online share of the pie that everyone in your market space is fighting for.
The world wide web is littered with “brochureware” type websites that were built either as an afterthought for the business, or as a hopeful “big red button” solution that would somehow automagically deliver new customers without requiring any commitment of time and effort, without crafting an online marketing strategy with clear goals and objectives, and without a focused and consistent plan of action aimed at helping the business achieve specific results.
If all you want is to have a “me too” online presence so you can put a web address on your business card, letterbox flyers and the back of your car and then hope for the best, then none of what I’m going to say in the rest of this post matters to you.
If you are looking for ways to increase your business exposure online, then using social networking sites like Twitter can be a great way to go, especially when you have a business blog.
I’ve recently come across a great free WordPress plugin that automatically notifies Twitter of your new blog posts, then links your new entry (called a tweet) in Twitter back to your blog post. Anyone following you in Twitter can then see the new entry and come visit your site to read the rest of your blog post.
The plugin is called Tweet My Blog and was developed by a couple of well-known internet marketers, John Merrick (no, not the Elephant Man, but a computer programmer from the UK!) and Soren Jordansen (co-creator of the best-selling hands-free plug’n'play affiliate marketing system called “CB Pirate“).
According to its creators, Tweet My Blog is “a Wordpress plugin that makes it super easy to combine the powers of Wordpress and Twitter – driving massive amounts of traffic to your blog. And the best part… It’s 100% free!”
If you are thinking of starting a business blog, or if you are a small business owner looking for a cost-effective way to create a web presence for your business, then check out some of the previous posts on this blog, which explains why setting up a blog using our step-by-step business blog video tutorials may be a smarter strategy for growing your business online than spending money on web site development.
In the video below, we look at the results we have achieved 60 days after setting up this business blog on a brand new domain name, simply by following the same instructions we provide to small business owners in our “how to start a business blog” tutorials.
The video above shows that, with only 16 posts made to this blog since we registered the domain name “selfpublishweb.com” 60 days ago, the number of pages indexed in Google as well as the number of visitors to this site has increased by over 400% since we made our previous video, documenting the growth of this blog.
Search Google for terms like “blogs”, “blogging”, “business blog”, “business blogging”, etc … and you’ll find tens of millions of competing pages. As stated in the video, gaining any kind of search engine traffic in a market as competitive as this one for a site that is barely 60 days old and that was set up on a brand new domain, therefore, is quite a challenge. Nonetheless, as the video shows, we are steadily increasing our exposure in the search engines, and attracting visitors to our blog, using the exact same methods and strategies we share with our customers in our videos and training emails.
If you run any form of community or networking organization, like a business networking group, church, local community association, network marketing team, etc … then a community blog can be a powerful tool to help you promote, educate and inform people about your organization, as well as to keep your members informed and up-to-date.
I have just finished setting up a blog for Independent Business Network Incorporated, a local, not for profit, small business networking community that I belong to, and I would like to share with you some of the benefits of setting up such a site, as well as some tips on how you can do the same, especially if you have never set up a WordPress blog before.
Tips For Creating A Community Or Shared Blog
The community blog I recently set up for the small businesses networking group allows each member to post articles on topics related to their particular business. If they have a web presence of their own, they can post links back to their own web sites, business blogs, e-commerce stores, etc … in their articles and posts.
For each type of business, I then created a corresponding category (e.g. Travel, Legal Services, Bookkeeping, etc …), so that whenever a member publishes an article to the community blog, they simply assign their post to a category that is relevant to their business. This not only makes it easier for blog readers to find content when they visit the site (i.e. all travel-related articles will appear under the “travel” category), but because the blog has been set up to show categories in the URL using permalinks, each post ends up with their own unique keyword rich page address, which makes it easier for search engines to index.
The blog revolution has introduced a whole new set of blogging terms, blog abbreviations and blogging acronyms to business online. Here are some of the more common and useful blogging definitions to help you understand blargon terminology:
A blog is short for weblog, which, according to most definitions, is a simple online diary that allows you to publish, date and list your periodic thoughts, opinions and musings on a particular topic or idea, generally in reverse chronological order (i.e. whatever you publish last appears first). When you focus a blog towards business purposes (e.g. promoting your business, products or services), then you have a business blog, instead of a personal blog.
Blogging is the act of posting content on blogs. A blogger is someone who blogs and the Blogosphere represents the entire universe of blogs and the internet blogging community.
Most blogging activities are made possible via the use of a blogging platform, which is the software application used for blogging. Most blogging platforms are sophisticated Content Management Systems (CMS) that allow you to create and publish content without requiring you to have “web site skills” like knowing how to write or edit HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language – the language used to create web pages.). Blogging platfoms also generally give you the choice of setting up a blog on the software creator’s domain (e.g. mybusiness.wordpress.com), or hosting the blog on your own domain (this is the recommended option for businesses). Common blog publishing platforms include WordPress, TypePad, Movable Type, Blogger and many others.
For business blogging purposes, it is important to understand some of the main components of a blog, both internal and external.
Loading ...