Increasing Business Visibility

Sidebar imagery sets blogs apart

Written on Thursday 8 September 2011 by Alice

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There is a design agency I keep an eye on. I like them because they are distinctly visual (I suppose design agencies are supposed to be), but it is the myriad of colours and the way they use images that attracts my attention.

This is not confined to just their graphics on paper, but online too. Their style is distinctive, and may not suit everybody, but simplicity combined with complexity is tastefully intertwined, and they have found a way to put this concept onto their websites and blogs they also design for.

If you are into NLP, you will know that people understand and process things in different ways. Some respond visually, others to words and the rest to sounds. A blog can use all these to put its messages across. By using all of these media, there is a better chance of capturing the attention of more potential followers and customers.

A WordPress.org blogsite allows you to do virtually anything you like on your sidebars. You could go down the usual route and add in conventional widgets which are mainly text-based, or you could go out on a limb and create linked images. This is particularly apt if your main subject lends itself to a visual presence, and each image is specifically designed to look ‘clickable’ (three-dimensional, enticing and understandable), so your visitors could end up have far more fun exploring your site than an ordinary blog. After all, isn’t that what you want them to do?

Having images on your sidebars linking to various areas of your website should be in addition to the navigation bar, because there will always be people who prefer using that method to enter a site (reference NLP) and won’t understand the concept of clickable pictures. Don’t discriminate people who are wired differently from you, they all have to be accommodated if you are going to make your website succeed.

blogs and blogging, design makes a difference, increasing business visibility, Self-hosted Wordpress blogs - Tags: attention, blogs and blogging, design agency, graphics, images, navigation, NLP, sidebars, text based, visitors, visual, websites, widgets - 0 Comments - Why not leave a comment?

The use of blogging within social media campaigns

Written on Monday 5 September 2011 by Alice

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I’ve said it many times before that your blog should be the hub of your social media marketing strategy. It is the alpha and omega of marketing online, from it your social networking exploits can issue forth to their audiences and be there to collect the finished results.

Of course blogging should take centre stage. Many companies overlook or brush aside blogs, as they think they are used purely for self-expression. They fail to understand the importance for communication to get the overall marketing message across. An archive of easy accessible material aimed at education, entertainment and information-based articles specifically written for the audience in mind.

Using social media within integrated marketing campaigns can only work if there is a realistic objective. If this is understood, there are various methods which can put in place to guide the campaign towards the ultimate goal. Blindly participating on social media without a proper aim may be enjoyable in the short term, but it can be also be viewed as a waste of time because nothing is seemed to be achieved. Only by aiming towards a proper outcome will social media become useful and powerful within the overall marketing campaign.

Blogging and social media used in combination will enable companies to learn all they need to know about their customers. Social networking isn’t about selling, the focus should be on communication, conversations, observation, following and understanding trends, catching breaking-news early and taking action before the competition. Used properly, companies can almost ‘merge’ with their target market: comprehending, empathising, educating, gently changing the general shift towards their products or services without actually using direct selling tactics.

The power of integration should be two-way, through the encouragement of responses from the readership and inviting followers to subscribe so they are constantly kept up to date with the latest posts. And, of course, blogs can be easily and effectively integrated within all social networking profiles through RSS, thus extending the audience and exposing the marketing campaign over a wider area within the web. And by participating in sharing and referral tactics within social bookmarking sites will also prompt further expansion of the messages involved, as well as a larger awareness of the blog and its authors.

blogs and blogging, increasing business visibility, online marketing, social networking - Tags: audiences, blog, communication, conversation, education, information, integration, marketing strategy, objective, observation, other social media, RSS, social networking, taking action - 1 Comment - Why not leave a comment?

Focus on one thing at a time

Written on Friday 2 September 2011 by Alice

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Not all of us are multi-taskers. As a woman I’m supposed to be able to multi-task, but in reality it’s not second nature to me. I am very good at concentrating on one thing really well, sometimes to the detriment of all that goes on around me! I can put all my effort into making that performance as perfect as I can, and hate it when I get distracted by external stimuli that break the spell and force me to think of something else.

In business this can be a good trait – especially for small enterprises. The world is huge, and competition can be fierce, so being a ‘jack of all trades’ is not necessarily a good thing. It is unwise to ‘spread yourself too thinly’, to dabble in many things and become master of none. OK, it’s certainly good to read widely and extensively, to expand your knowledge within your chosen field, but sometimes it’s preferable to focus your expertise towards a particular area.

My tip for a small business is to find a niche. Something that is required by your target market (customers), you fully understand all the problems associated with it and you have the best solution possible. Alternatively, your niche is very lucrative, so concentrating on that particular venture will being in a good return and raise you above the competition.

By focusing on a small area, you will be able to become a true expert within that subject. Don’t get sidetracked by attractive prospectives that may persuade you to stray from your chosen path, they will only dilute what you have to offer, and make your niche less understandable.

I know a particular florist that started by providing beautiful, sumptuous and exotic bouquets. If you wanted to send a floral gift that was different, and not just an ordinary bunch of flowers, they were the place to go. Unfortunately, they panicked with the extended recession, and started to sell other items. Now their shop offers all kinds of unrelated additions, from garden implements, trinkets, figurines, cards and even clothes. There is no resemblance to the little florist that began its life only a few years ago.

I have no idea if this tactic has paid off, but it has certainly made me think whether they still provided those extraordinary floral displays for which I first knew them. The confusion has probably put off some custom because nobody is quite sure what they really sell. The pavement outside used to be decorated with wonderful blooms and exciting plants, now their windows show strange and weird gifts, mannikins sporting floral dresses and not a flower in sight.

Work out exactly what your real niche is, and stick to it. Don’t think that you need to know or offer everything. In fact, by becoming a true expert in your field, with the help of your blog, of course, you will attract more people because they understand what you do. They will know exactly what to expect, they won’t become confused or disillusioned, and they will feel safe either approaching you or recommending you to someone else. And eventually you will become the ‘point of call’ for that particular niche, even over your competitors!

blogs and blogging, increasing business visibility, marketing methods - Tags: competition, concentrating, expertise, focusing, multi-taskers, niche, solutions, subject, target market - 1 Comment - Why not leave a comment?

You need to share to get more traffic

Written on Wednesday 31 August 2011 by Alice

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I’ve had a lot of questions recently about how to get lots of traffic to a blog and whether it is worth participating in social media to do this.

Unfortunately, if you want to promote your blog successfully, you need to think in the long-term. As with all marketing methods, nothing can be done properly overnight, and that does include using social networking sites.

You need to use social media to build up your reputation and your readers’ understanding about you. We all can’t be blessed with instant recognition and a truly magnetic personality that instantly attracts thousands of followers – those that appear to have these qualities have worked really hard behind the scenes before unleashing themselves on their public. Even those that seem to ‘pop out of the woodwork’ really have been slaving away at their promotional tactics and business presentation.

So to go back to the original concept, yes, you do need to use social media to increase your blog’s traffic. The cold, hard reality is that you need to work at gaining followers. This can be accomplished by becoming the best in your field, your niche, or whatever area your blog’s subject is about.

The 80/20 rule also applies here. Give away 80% of what you know and retain the truly best bits within the 20% you charge for. Win followers on your side by sharing your knowledge; help people, let them get to know you and trust in you, gain from the added value you have given them to improve their lives, and make them believe there is much more to have if they maintain their connection with you.

And while you are succeeding in collecting a huge number of followers, friends and subscribers, you’ll be feeding your new posts regularly into your social networking profiles and Twitter stream. It is there you will have a potential audience to read your wonderful new content, which will allow your blog traffic stats to go up and up.

To make these stats even better, participate in some sharing activities of your own. Nobody tolerates a one-sided relationship, so start reading other people’s blogs, comment on their posts, retweet them on Twitter, share them on Facebook, recommend them on social bookmarking sites, refer readers to them, offer to write guest posts and interview them for your own blog.

And after a while you’ll start to enjoy this social networking lark that so frightened you in the beginning – and as well as making lots of friends, associates, contacts and business prospects, your blog’s traffic will be improving all the time!

Magic Moment: Variable comment logins

Written on Friday 26 August 2011 by Alice

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Back in the old days when you commented on a blog post you wrote what you wanted to say and then filled in the details below about yourself before publishing it. Why did you bother to do this? Well, this information accompanied the comment and allowed any interested parties to click on your name (which was usually a link back to your website, if you had filled that part in) to find out more about you.

There is another good reason for this – it’s not just humans who clicked on those links. Spiders like comments as they see them as new material that can be indexed, so a busy blog that has lots of comments is usually placed much higher in the search engines than unpopular blogs. And of course these spiders are then happily crawling over the commentor’s website too…

Anyway, this Magic Moment is about the four ways you can register yourself before you publish your comment in a WordPress.com blog. Clever apps have been incorporated that allows you to choose whatever identity you would like to comment under.

The first one is as a guest. This is where you are allowed to put in your personal data how you want it to be:

You don’t need to enter in your website or blog details, but if you have one I recommend that you do, for the reasons stated at the beginning of this post.

The second option is for those who have a WordPress account. This one is the usual preference that I comment under. This account is recognised throughout the WordPress blogging world, and your gravatar automatically comes up to accompany your comment as an extra visual presence.

Once you’ve entered your WordPress username and password, your comment will be acknowledged as a WordPress user:

The third option is via your Twitter account. A lot of people might prefer this as they are usually always logged into Twitter so registering is easy.

Once you’ve filled in your details, you’ll be logged in as a Twitterer, and your name will be linked back to your Twitter profile:

The final option is via Facebook, and the same thing applies:

And once your Facebook details have been entered in and accepted, you’ll be commenting under your Facebook profile:

For each profile you comment under, the picture icon you use for that account will show as your gravatar. As I use the same one for all my accounts so there are no differences for me to demonstrate, but be aware that if you have a silly Facebook icon, do you really want that showing up next to your comment?

Make it easy for your readers to take action

Written on Thursday 25 August 2011 by Alice

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The whole point of a blog is that it enables your readers to interact with you. That is the beauty of Web2.0, and sets it apart from static websites that just sit there looking pretty (if you’re lucky) and boring (if you’re complacent).

So to make the experience of visiting your blog exciting for your readers, there are loads of apps and widgets at your disposal to upload and activate, which will keep your visitors really busy!

I don’t expect you to put everything available into your blog, or it will look like a dog’s breakfast and nobody will be able to choose what to do next, and will probably result in them running away! But there are some elements that should be present if you are to maintain the interaction a blog deserves.

One is to encourage some sort of subscription service. There are so many ways of doing this, varying from sophisticated sign up boxes to buttons you press after making a comment. For me it is important to make it very obvious to the reader that you want them to subscribe, and to stage it so they literally fall over the methods for doing so. I have often landed on a really good blog that has interested me, and wanted to keep in touch with the latest posts, only to hunt drastically around the site to look for a method of subscription, even to sign up to a RSS feed.

Of course RSS feeds always don’t fulfill my needs. I hate it when it merely leads to bookmarking the blog from my browser bar – I can’t be bothered to check that every day for new posts. What I am looking for is something that sends the newly-published posts to my in-box or to a reader in my search engine provider. This can be accomplished by creating a RSS URL through Feedburner (or equivalent), or using the various plugins or widgets available from WordPress. Read about one of them here: Don’t leave your WP greet box plugin undone.

Sharing is almost a requisite for blogs, as it has become commonplace to retweet a good post on Twitter or to share it on one of the many social bookmarking sites. This should definitely be encouraged, especially if you want to increase the traffic to your blog or expose it to a larger audience. There are lots of apps available to enable sharing, from individual transactions to collective mechanisms that allow the reader a choice in wherever he wants to promote your post. Even WordPress.com have a simple version: read Sharing is easy on WordPress.com to learn more.

These are just two interactive activities you could place on your blog, and there are many more to choose from which can enhance your blog’s performance and increase its interest factor. Just examine the widgets available for WordPress.com, and check out the myriad of plugins available for WordPress.org, and do a bit of experimenting. If you don’t know what to expect, take a look at other blogs you admire to find out what they have to offer, and then see if you can find a way of emulating the same functions that take your fancy or stimulate you to take action!

Magic Moment: Main settings update

Written on Thursday 18 August 2011 by Alice

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The settings on a blog are usually ignored because either they have been forgotten, or the blogger doesn’t understand what and how important they are.

I always make a bee-line to change the settings as soon as I have created a blog. You don’t need to act with such urgency, but it is important not to neglect this aspect of a blog if you want to optimise the search engine response and regulate how your blog relates to its community.

This is the main settings page:

I have already made my changes from the default settings provided. They are, of course, what I would like and fit in with my perception of how I want my blog to work, and should not be set in stone as ‘the’ settings to have. You should be free to ‘play’ with your settings to see what works best for you.

Magic Moment #7 would like to show you what my settings are – purely as a guide:

The Site Title will show up on the very top of your internet browser you see this blog in. (In PCs it goes from the left, on Macs it is centered.) It is the most prominent title in the search engine listings of your blog, so is very important in SEO terms. It should consist of your blog’s title, if you have one.

The Tagline is your blog’s strapline, or a brief description of what your blog is about, or who you are or what your business is about. Don’t make it too long, and preferably memorable. It is usually placed beneath your site title in search engines listings.

How important is it to set the correct location of your blog? Well, the default is UTC+0 which doesn’t take into account the blog’s country or light-saving-time-changes and such like. If you have set up a RSS feed into your social media, this will prevent your posts from being delayed before they arrive in your Twitter stream, for example.

I am very pernickety when it comes to presenting dates. The British write our dates differently from the Americans (a phenomenon which created problems when I was dating freshly prepared food in my San Francisco breakfast bar job) and I like my days to go before my months. Therefore I have used the setting ‘l j F Y’ to create my preferred format. You can find out which formats are available through the explanatory link available.

Setting the time presentation is purely cosmetic. I didn’t need to change anything here. I also didn’t amend the day my week started and which language I used. Don’t forget to click the ‘Save Changes’ button when you’ve finished.

And there’s your gravatar to amend. Check out how to do this through this e-course ‘How to update personal profiles and upload gravatars’. Once done, your gravatar will represent you throughout the internet via your blog, so make sure it is large, clear and something you can live with without embarrassment!

Blogging, Free Wordpress blogs, increasing business visibility, SEO - Tags: blog, blog location, browser, dates, description, gravatars, listings, representation, RSS feed, save changes, search engine optimisation, settings, site title, tagline, times, Twitter - 0 Comments - Why not leave a comment?

How clean is your theme?

Written on Wednesday 10 August 2011 by Alice

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I took the plunge and changed my theme again – but how many of you have noticed?

The theme experts will know exactly where to look – and I hope they will approve – but the whole idea was to make improvements to the insides of my theme, and ultimately my blog’s performance, by having a major ‘deep clean’.

Setting up a WordPress.org blog isn’t majorly expensive if you do it yourself (though hiring a web-designer to do it for you may be), but apart from the costs of hosting there doesn’t seem to be many more demands on your budget. Plugins and other applications are free (many suggest you make donations) and so are a very large quantity of themes. If you know a bit of HTML and PHP you could go into the CSS and make necessary changes – but only if you have the knowledge and necessary know-how.

But sometimes this false economy can create problems that you may not be aware of. You may be very proud of your free theme and how you have changed it. I know, I was! For many months I stood back and admired my blog’s theme, it’s purple boxes and mouse-changing coloured links. That is, until some very kind blogging benefactor pointed out the defects…

There is no such thing as a free lunch. My free theme had lots of unseen code behind it clogging up my search engine optimisation. Even my stats plugin wouldn’t work properly, and I had to rely on Google Analytics to monitor my blog’s performance (not that there is anything wrong with that, but it is only one side of understanding traffic and connectivity). Apparently he could see the ‘blockage’ with his software and advised me to purchase a paid-for theme. Only then would I have a ‘clean’ theme with no restrictions, freeing up my visibility on the web with a view to increasing my audience and blog awareness.

For a while I resisted. I was envisaging going back to freelancing and I had to save up for the fees of a diploma in digital marketing course I am starting next month (I believe in continued self-development). But all that time my poor blog was grinding to a halt under so much blogging code-crud and overbearing pressure I’m surprised it was working at all.

But last week I bit the bullet and bought a Headway theme. It was a bit of a financial shock, but I’m glad I did it. The day I transferred it onto my blog and started to develop my design, I received 208 hits! Amazing! I knew that was the case because my blog stats started to work again – a definitely worthwhile reason to have installed it. The result, after a lot of trial and error (I do like a challenge), hasn’t made much difference visually (I had no intentions of doing so), but the performance value has rocketed!

So now I will wallow in my improved blogging situation and keep you monitored of the differences it will make – and it will be in ideal time to work on my SEO to see what makes a difference and what does not.

Why bees and wasps would make good (and bad) bloggers

Written on Friday 5 August 2011 by Alice

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A busy honey bee (iStockPhoto)

Sitting in my garden, soaking up some much-needed vitamin D, I had time to look up from my book to marvel at the industriousness of the insects amongst my flowers.

We have quite a number of flowers in bloom, in spite of lack of rain recently, and the bees were busily visiting every invitingly-open, brightly-coloured geranium, black-eyed susan and marigold that adorn the side of the lawn. Their persistence was amazing, unwittingly busy in their quest for food and pollen, darting from flower to flower, expertly extracting what they needed.

Of course other insects are equally persistent, as were those pesky wasps that ruined our lunch in the garden when our friends came round. Unphased by waving hands, squeaks and squeals (mainly from me), their aim was to get to the source of available food, unaware of how annoying their presence was to us.

I suppose bees and wasps have to be persistent in order to survive. Bees can be contributed to good bloggers, who regularly provide worthwhile material to read, their hard work providing a source of nourishment that feeds our desire to learn more and improve our lives. Their persistence will maintain the health of the hive (compare that to your niche or business), and when carefully harvested can ensure the survival of your objectives in years to come.

Wasps also have a community to maintain, which in this case is not so desirable. Their maliciousness is unparalleled, and they will use their weaponry in such a way that bees cannot. They will bother and annoy us for their own purposes, and spread havoc wherever they go, leaving behind continuous destruction. Wasps could be compared to spammers, who litter our comment inboxes, bother us with hard-selling tactics and even destroy livelihoods with malware and other unfortunate occurrences.

Persistence is a very good thing if properly managed with the best intent, but it can also be detrimental to all concerned if used inappropriately and without consideration for others. If you want to pursue the persistence path, make sure that what you provide is full of added value, providing material that will help others rather than crowing about yourself, and offering material that is worth sharing and won’t get eliminated by a click of the delete button (accompanied with a scowl).

blogs and blogging, increasing business visibility, marketing methods, Writing tips - Tags: added value, annoying, bees, best intent, bloggers, busy, community, health, industrious, nourishment, persistence, sharing, spammers, survival, wasps, worthwhile - 0 Comments - Why not leave a comment?

Magic Moment: Tweet old posts automatically

Written on Thursday 4 August 2011 by Alice

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This is an exciting new plugin (only available to WordPress.org users, sorry) I found while following my friends on Twitter. It randomly and automatically publishes old posts at specified intervals on Twitter, which will help promote your posts to a wider audience by giving them the extra exposure they deserve!

Go to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/, search for ‘Tweet Old Post’ and it will be the first on offer:

Download it onto your computer and upload it into your FTP browser such as FileZilla. Alternatively go to your plugin page and request ‘Tweet Old Post’ and upload it to your plugins.

Once it’s installed, don’t forget to activate it…

…and click on ‘Settings’:

Fill in the fields to set up what you would like to happen, and don’t forget to confirm by clicking on the buttons at the bottom, to save your settings and to send a ‘practise’ tweet:

Here it is shown in TweetDeck – isn’t it exciting? Now your old posts will get a better chance of being read by a larger amount of people in different time zones throughout the Twittersphere!

Blogging help, blogs and blogging, increasing business visibility, other social media, Self-hosted Wordpress blogs - Tags: automatic, exposure, FileZilla, FTP, plugin, promote your posts, retweet, settings, Tweet Old Post, TweetDeck, Twitter, wider audience, Wordpress.org - 2 Comments - Why not leave a comment?

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