Creating Your Blog’s Content: Creating Value
When you’re creating content for yoru blog, be sure to make it valuable to your target audience. Don’t just write for the sake of writing. You’ll be wasting people’s time and THAT makes a bad first impression. You can’t expect people to come back to your blog if you’ve got nothing of value to share.
If you so hit a brick wall and find you really don’t have anything to say, then tap into the hundreds of thousands of other voices on the web. There are plenty other bloggers who do have something to say.
- Use your blog to share their videos and/or their articles.
- Use your blog to post reviews…. not only of books, but of software and other products as well.
- Invite guests to post entries on your blog.
In the end, a blog is a communication tool. What resources do you recommend to your customers/family/friends? What products/services do people look to you for advice prior to purchasing?
The next time you offer a recommendation, whether it’s a book or a piece of computer hardware, create a category called "recommendations" and start posting blogs on the subject.
Technorati is your blog’s best friend.
Dane Carlson has created a great app that takes your Technorati ranking and uses it to tell you what the "street value" of your blog may be.
If you fill in this blog’s URL, you’ll see it’s worth NOTHING. Why? Because it’s not listed at Technorati.
Understand that Technorati is like the Google of blog search. It’s truly the GOLD STANDARD by which your blog will be judged. The thing is, it’s possible to have a GREAT Technorati rating while your Google Page Rank is STILL in the toilet. If your site is new, then EXPECT Google to ignore it for at least a year.
Meanwhile, Technorati will begin indexing your blog and keeping track of incoming links LONG before the Google bot acknowledges your blog’s existence.
If you focus on building your Technorati ranking, you’ll find you’re seeing benefits in Google as well.
Golden Mantras for Effective Email Communication
Rajesh Shakya has an excellent post on Golden Mantras for Effective Email Communication
In his post, he outlines several excellent points. I’d disagree with him on sending Word docs as attachments without first clearing that the person on the receiving end actually HAS Microsoft Word. (Surprisingly, it’s NOT the only Word Processing App out there!)
Email is an ESSENTIAL communication tool. Mastering the basics of business email is an essential skill each and every business owner with a web site or blog should master.
Blogs as marketing tools
Blogs are powerful marketing tools. They are one of my FAVORITE marketing tools for my clients for many reasons:
- They are easy to update.
- Clients can add content easily and quickly, without any knowledge of programming.
- The search engines love them.
When you think of marketing in the terms defined by the dictionary, "all of the activities involved in transferring goods from a producer to consumers, esp. including advertising" then marketing can be hard.
If, however, you take the approach that marketing is merely letting people know about the solutions you offer for their problems, then suddenly marketing doesn’t seem quite so overwhelming. And when you start to view marketing as communicating with customers, you can see why a blog is a great way to market your business.
Read more about blogs as marketing tools here.
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