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Tag Archive: bloggers

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

Written on Friday 5 August 2011 by Alice

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?

How to humanise your business through social media

Written on Friday 22 July 2011 by Alice

Click my logo to ask me a question!

One of the changes that digital marketing is making on businesses in the second decade of the 21st century is enabling them to emphasise their human element. After all, at the end of the day, it’s important to remember that people buy from people, and not necessarily from corporations or even brands.

Therefore businesses should not lose sight of the people who are an integral part of the organisation, eg the stakeholders (in the broadest sense), which includes the owners, staff, customers, suppliers, media and maybe more, depending on the size and nature of the business.

By promoting this ‘people power’ through social media, which includes blogging, it’s important to remember the communication factors that have created this social revolution. Social media is ‘social’, it thrives in conversations, comments, feedback, real-time responses, immediate interaction with the people who matter: past, present and prospective customers.

Therefore it’s imperative that customers realise there is a human element behind the scenes. Real twitterers who respond to tweets about their business, ask a question or present a statement that is relevant to the organisation. Real bloggers who respond to comments and feedback as soon as they are posted, or write a relevant and value added post to answer a scenario brought up yesterday, or even hours ago.

We live in a world of ‘now’, real-time slipping through out fingers, yesterday’s news that actually happened only minutes ago, culturing a mentality of immediate responses, lack of patience and prompt reactions. It requires real people to adapt to these stimulae, react and respond to the matter at hand – and most important of all, to provide the ‘human’ side that determines them from robots and technology.

Only humans can gossip, taunt, laugh, joke, ask pertinent questions, quip, create puns, offer on the spot advice, commiserate, empathise, understand, comprehend, respond effectively to difficult questions, see a point of view, make us laugh, go out of their way to find the answer – and much more.

So don’t be embarrassed to be ‘human’ when you write your posts, send your tweets and respond to a Facebook tag. This doesn’t mean losing your cool or revealing anything unsuitable about yourself (unless it’s relevant), but it does mean talking about your mistakes as much as your successes, facing your foibles as much as promoting your expertise, telling a story as well as relating a case study, expressing happiness as well as reporting business news.

And the more your customers sense how ordinary your business is, not just a faceless corporation with oversea call centres and uninterested managers who only tow the party line, the more likely they feel they could get real value, good customer service and a real feel of ‘completeness’ when buying from you.

marketing methods, online marketing, Social Media - Tags: bloggers, blogging, businesses, communication, customer service, digital marketing, Facebook, human element, interaction, other social media, people, responses, stakeholders, Twitter, value - 0 Comments - Why not leave a comment?

Where can you find suitable content for your blog?

Written on Friday 11 March 2011 by Alice

Fairy Blog Mother

Finding enough content to write is always a troubling problem for bloggers. I constantly read on forums bloggers asking for inspiration about what to put into their blogs, especially since there is that constant nagging in their minds that they need to be consistent and frequent in their postings. This is particularly prominent if you have advertising and affiliates on your blog, as you rely on a constant stream of visitors to make such applications pay their way.

I suppose it doesn’t help to say the more you post, the easier it becomes. It’s all down to practising, persistence and perseverance. Get into the habit of putting down your thoughts, even if it’s in draft form, to develop later into full-blown posts. Diligent bloggers may have plenty of potential posts in draft, waiting for that final finish.

Look around you for inspiration, there is plenty of ‘post fodder’ about if you know where to look. Look at the emails in your in- and out-box, especially the ones you write in reply. This is an excellent source of your expertise. If you are a prolific writer elsewhere, refer to past articles that you’ve written, and there is no reason why you can’t rewrite old stuff that may have got out of date, may have had more recent developments or needs a more prominent boost.

Refer to the internet for information: subscribe to Google Alerts with certain keywords that interest you or are relevant to your business, and you will get plenty of posts and articles other people have written. Use these not only to learn more about your industry, but rewrite these topics in your own style or in your own point of view, agreeing or disagreeing, adding to the subject matter or explaining a point further. This is not plagarism if you make your work totally different from the original.

Remember things that have been said or you’ve heard somewhere, such as networking events, or even when you are meeting your clients: ask them for ideas, or question them to get their point of view. They may ask for explanations on certain subjects, and their question with your reply could easily be adapted as a post.

It’s all due to you acquiring the right sort of blogging mind-set. This may sound pretentious, but once you do train your brain to start looking for posting material wherever it goes, content will start springing out of the woodwork! Start thinking in that frame of mind, and you might be pleasantly surprised…

blogs and blogging, Writing tips - Tags: advertising and affiliates, blog content, bloggers, blogging, blogging mind-set, blogs and blogging, Google Analytics, inspiration, past articles, posts, Questions and Answers, rewrite old topics - 0 Comments - Why not leave a comment?

How often should you post in your blog?

Written on Wednesday 11 August 2010 by Alice

Fairy Blog Mother

At my brother’s 40th birthday party last month my father came up to me and said I was looking podgy, just like my great aunt Margaret. Well, that raised my ire (if not my blood pressure), partly because my great aunt was morbidly obese and a hypochondriac, and partly because it was true (ideally I should lose three stone or 42 pounds).

So since then I have been down the gym every week day (can’t quite manage the weekend), pounding away on the treadmill in the hope of losing a bit of weight, the spectre of my terrifying relative looming up to goad me to keep wobbling on…

Treadmills are great places to think, and I wondered if all this consistent activity was doing any good (though the scales said otherwise). With my brain switched into blog mode, I remembered I’d recently read that blogs become more successful the more you post. This is obviously true, as all this new material constantly being churned out is like a continuous buffet for the search engine spiders, who feast on this content before returning it to be indexed.

Prolific bloggers post several times a day. Woah, why? I hear you ask. Well, if your blog’s purpose is to make money through the advertising and affiliate links it contains, this can only be achieved through a constant flow of traffic, and continuous indexing of your posts, combined with your audiences subscribing to RSS feeds and newsreaders, traffic alert systems and social media scrutinising, will bring in the necessary quota of readers to make your financial ventures successful.

But what is the optimum minimum? Three times a week – quite a respectable and achievable goal. I manage this for my boss’s blog, but not my own, partly because I have other commitments after work (going down the gym for example) that take up my time. You can see from your blog stats that consistent posting will easily maintain your traffic and readership loyalty much more than a flurry of activity followed by a period of famine. Spiders are hungry and need continuous feeding, and if neglected may easily search their nourishment from elsewhere.

And what if you want to start up a blog or resurrect it from a period of abandonment? Then you need to publish as many days as you can (a bit like me going down the gym) as consistently as you can manage with the correct kind of content (or diet) that will sustain interest and build up a following. Reduce the size of your blogs (I’m sure mine are far too long) by breaking them down into many subjects that can be posted independently, and keep an editorial diary to stimulate and store new ideas to prevent a post drought. Watch out for another post about what to write about soon – there, I’ve given myself another subject to research and deliver to you!

blogs and blogging, increasing business visibility, social networking - Tags: achievable goal, blog posts, bloggers, consistent new material, constant flow of traffic, editorial diary, other social media, quality and consistency of posts, readership loyalty, regularly posting on your blog, RSS feeds, search engine spiders - 0 Comments - Why not leave a comment?

17 elements of blogging etiquette

Written on Wednesday 14 July 2010 by Alice

Fairy Blog Mother

People have various concepts of what constitutes blogging etiquette. Of course there are the obvious ones like being nice to other bloggers, and much of these suggestions are just common sense, so no etiquette is set in stone and does rely on the goodwill of the bloggers themselves.

Here are some to consider (and some of these I own up to breaking throughout my blogging career, a fact I don’t relish in and am thoroughly ashamed of):

1. Don’t be rude, show respect and be polite to other bloggers and commenters.

2. Don’t copy other content without asking first. If you are given permission, fully acknowledge the author.

3. Remember to link to your resources and expert sources.

4. Don’t expect anything in return from linking to others, it’s not compulsory.

5. Respond to your comments in a cheerful, positive and thankful manner.

6. Don’t leave spammy comments on other people’s blogs.

7. Use your identity when blogging, don’t hide behind a persona.

8. Own up to your mistakes, it makes you more human and therefore likeable.

9. Stick to the subject of your posts or blog’s niche, don’t go off at a tangent.

10. Use correct punctuation, grammar and spelling, avoid text speak or colloquial language.

11. Don’t pepper your post with jargon.

12. Don’t overdo using keywords for SEO purposes, less than 10% is acceptable.

13. Check what you say is true by researching your facts properly, and never lay claim to content that isn’t yours.

14. Share good posts liberally on social networking sites.

15. Remember everything you publish is on public display, so check whether you really want to say it.

16. Don’t swear or use bad words, it isn’t impressive and can offend.

17. Make sure your pictures are suitably resized, to prevent lengthy downloading of your overlarge images.

How many others can you contribute to my list?

blogs and blogging, online marketing, social networking - Tags: be polite, bloggers, blogging etiquette, blogs and blogging, comments, content, keywords for SEO purposes, permission, show respect - 0 Comments - Why not leave a comment?