1st Commandment of Blogging
You’ve heard the hype - that blogs are the best way to market your business online. Your blog can be, and SHOULD be the most powerful marketing tool in your marketing arsenal. However, many companies are learning the hard way that there is the right way to run a blog… and more than a few wrong ways to use your business blog as a marketing tool.
The biggest and most glaring commandment of successful blogging has to be this:
1st Commandment of Blogging: Thou Shalt Begin by Being in Control of Thy OWN Blog
Your business blog should be a self hosted blog… period.
I am horrified and stunned by the number of large companies who have more than adequate resources who choose to dip their toe into the blogging waters and choose the path of a free blog to do so.
Wordpress.com, Blogger, LiveJournal are all great free blogging services and if you’re a stay at home mother who wants to express her creativity, then they are truly a great way to see if blogging is for you. By choosing one of these platforms for your business blog, you are broadcasting your level of blogging expertise AND your lack of commitment to your business blog.
The $10 for a domain name and the $120 or less for yearly hosting should NOT be a barrier to entry for ANY business which is SERIOUS about creating a blog to market their products and services.
I was contacted a while back by the VP of North American Operations of a company… well by a company large enough to have a VP of North American Operations. This VP had found my flagship blog (virtual impax) via a comment I had made on another blog as this other blogger was dragging the VP’s company’s name through the dirt because of some exceptionally poor customer service. When bloggers get dissed- they tend to blog about it. (Read Andy Beal’s Rant about Office Depot for social proof!)
So this VP writes to ask me to take a look at his company’s blog and to tell him what they’re doing wrong. I didn’t even have to follow the link to begin the diagnosis. The URL read companyname.wordpress.com.
Lee Oden answers the question of why you shouldn’t host your blog using a third party domain name in his post Learning from Business Blogging Mistakes.
First, you have no control. If you want to change blogging platforms, there is typically no reasonable way to redirect traffic from the old blog to the new address in a search engine friendly way.
If you’re serious about blogging, get serious from the start. Get a domain name and a hosting account for your blog. Starting your business blog with a free blogging account sets your business blogging up for failure from the start.
Watch Which Blog Experts You Follow…
I’m a blog pusher by trade. As such, it’s expected that I would know how to do basic things like correctly formatting my posts and setting up my RSS feed so it works. If you saw I couldn’t do that on my blogs, you’d have GREAT reason to suspect that I’m not who I claim to be.
I’m in the middle of developing a course called “The 8 Week Blog Power Launch“. To be honest, I’m developing the course as a way to relieve some of the “customer service” I’m providing to my blog clients. When it’s finished, I’ll be sharing it with others just because it’s been almost as much work as supporting all of my combined blogging clients, which is a lot like herding cats!
Anyhow, one thing I encourage course participants to do is to subscribe to the RSS feeds of other blogs. (I subscribe to a lot more than I list in my post The Best Making Money Blogging Advice.)
My iGoogle page is full to overflowing, so I began visiting each blog listed there to see if the blog was still worthy of a place on my page. To my HORROR I found one blog by a self professed blogging consultant that was obviously composed in Word and then copied and pasted directly into the post… Word coding and all! (Ordered and unordered lists do NOT make the jump from Word to Wordpress well AT ALL!)
Now the question…Should I out him here? He’s pretty wicked with his wit and I’m sure outing him would provoke an attack. His blog has more readers than this one… but not more than my Virtual Impax blog according to Alexa. Should I try to make a mortal enemy to boost traffic here?
I’ll be honest, if I had my The 8 Week Blog Power Launch product ready to sell, I’d out him. But I don’t and my time should be spent in compiling the feedback which continues to flood in from beta testers. (The most recent, “Don’t assume we know how to do anything!”… GOT IT!)
On to the next blog on my list. (I really should be working on the power launch stuff… I know! I’m calling this “research” to justify my procrastination.) This one is a competitor of sorts - well, he claims to be a blog expert as well. I noticed his RSS feed hasn’t updated since I subscribed. I click on the site. Oh, he’s been very busy creating content for his blog… just none of it is appearing on his RSS feed. Oh, he wants to sell you his services of setting up your blog for maximum performance though and will charge you handsomely to do so.
Again, I could out him. I’ve found that people who claim to have expertise they don’t possess get VERY touchy when their rookie mistakes are posted for the world to see. Another mortal enemy to engage in verbal battle… it would be a GREAT excuse to ignore the additional content I need to create to bring my course participants up to speed….
By the way, blogs whose RSS feeds I’m still subscribed to include (in addition to the four I listed in the post above) include:
- Court’s Internet Marketing School because it really is a blog which serves as a school for internet marketing!
- The Writer’s Manifesto by Monika Mundell because, she’s the greatest.
- Andy Beard because he IS the original blog guru!
- Itty Biz because Naomi always makes me at least smile if not laugh.
- Liz Strauss at Successful Blog because she makes me think.
- Catherine Lawson because she tells it like it is.
- Daily Blog Tips because Daniel knows his stuff!
These are the blogs whose RSS feeds will remain featured at the top of my iGoogle page. These are each blog experts WORTH following. I’ve launched over 100 blogs and I STILL learn something new at least weekly from each blog listed above!
The Best Make Money Blogging Advice
When you say “blogging” to most web savvy users, the first thing that comes to mind is MMO (Make Money Online). So how do you make money blogging?
This post was inspired by a post at a blog who I won’t give the benefit of a link. On this blog, for the past 18 months, the author has claimed to offer insight into how to make money blogging. I only found the blog recently, but the blog owner made recommendations such as using affiliate links for AllPosters.com (not an affiliate link) as images on your blog posts.
It sounds plausible, but recently it was revealed that the only way this particular blogger made money was to sell the blog. With only 346 RSS subscribers, I doubt the sale price of the blog would make any of the blog’s readers drool.
So where do you go for excellent advice on making money blogging?
Maki at Dosh Dosh shares significant insight on what has worked and what hasn’t for him in Publishing for Profit and Influence. In this recent post, he shares how important your passion on a subject is to your success in Niche Blogging. A few years ago, he shared How to Make Money Blogging: 7 Strategies to Help you Get Started Immediately, but read the recent entry before you read the second.
Of course, when it comes to the topic of making money by blogging, you have to talk about Darren Rowse of Problogger. net. Darren not only shares his “secrets”… (and since he shares them with so many readers… they can hardly be called “secrets”) of how he makes money blogging, he even show you exactly how he does it! He keeps a running feature on his blog to show how much each income stream contributes in “How I Make Money Blogging - Top Income Streams Update.” Darren makes no bones about the secret to making money blogging… it’s multiple streams of income.
Caroline Middlebrook is another straight shooter when it comes to the topic of making money online. In her post, Can You Make Money Online, Without Teaching About Making Money Online? she writes:
There are plenty of people who make a fortune in niches that have nothing to do with Internet Marketing but the reason we don’t know about these people is because they have no reason to tell their story! For example, a common and simple method of making money online is via niche blogging using monetized blogs. We know some of the prominent people who make money in this way, for example Darren Rowse. But we only know about Darren because of his ProBlogger blog where he shares his story.
How many other people out there who are busy working away in their niches but don’t have a blog where they document their journey, and don’t have an ebook or course that teaches others how to copy their system? These are the people you don’t see, that you never heard about. But just because you don’t see them does not mean they do not exist!
An ex of mine has been involved in Internet Marketing for many years. He is the creator of a popular Facebook application that was bringing in $200k a month until recently but he doesn’t teach other people how he did that! Nobody knows who he is. If I told you his name you would never have heard of him. He doesn’t have a blog like this one, he just works at his work privately and rakes in his money without anybody knowing about it.
Excellent advice.
Even more excellent advice, go to Rick Butts Worst Internet Marketing Advice I’ve Ever Heard. Rick is another “straight shooter” when it comes making money online.
Rick’s advice… pick three or four people and follow them. From what I’ve seen, these four bloggers are DEFINITELY worth a your time and attention.
Wordpress SEO and Search Engine Marketing
When it comes to search engine marketing, you can’t beat a web blog, especially a Wordpress self hosted web blog. It’s no secret that self hosted Wordpress blogs can be tweaked to become literal power houses when it comes to Search Engine Marketing.
Web blogs are especially powerful search engine marketing tools, but in order to get the most out of your Wordpress blog, you’ll need to tweak your installation.
Yoast has written a truly inspired The must read article about WordPress SEO. It not only has earned a place in my RSS feed… this article is bookmarked as well. He says it’s his best article yet… I say it’s the best article I’ve seen on the web on the subject!
Blog Marketing FAQ: The Importance of Hosting
The importance of finding the best hosting site for your blog is the first and most essential part of creating your blog. The difference between a good hosting site for your blog and a bad hosting site can mean the difference between success and failure of your blog.James Mowery of the Performancing Blog writes about the mistakes he has made since becoming a pro blogger. James shares the tragic tale of how something went awry with the company where he chose to host his blog. The company changed servers and restored a 4 month old backup. Suddenly, James lost the previous 4 months of work he had put into his blog. He writes:
This mistake could probably be explained in another way: maybe, just maybe, all I need to realize is that I got what I paid for. I got ripped off, but I did, in fact, receive what I paid for. I tried going to cheap route, and it came back to haunt me. It was a huge and costly mistake.
Solution: Always test backups and sign with a reliable hosting company.
I often read blog posts written for people who want to either become a pro blogger OR who want to use their blog as a marketing tool for their businesses. If either of these are what you have in mind when you launch your blog, begin with choosing the absolute BEST hosting you can afford!!!
What is the Best Blog Hosting Site?
Hostican provides affordable blog hosting and fantastic support! They are a recommended host by Wordpress for Wordpress blogs as well.
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