Tag Archives: website

Why you should start your business with a blog

Optimise your blogOne of the most important elements of a website is to get indexed regularly by the search engines. There is nothing more demoralizing than spending hours on creating a wonderful website, only to have it sitting there unnoticed, lonely and neglected.

The trouble is, there are so many websites now in the internet, it takes time for the search engines to crawl through them all. Even if thousands of more algorithms were created to accomplish this feat, the logistics would still value visiting the sites that were more likely to be updated with new material. It may be demoralizing for you not to have your website visited, but it can also be demoralizing (if possible) for a spider to visit a website where there is nothing for him to index.

However, blogs are a different matter. They are designed to provide regular new content. It is their function to publish posts whenever needed, and thrive with a prolific writer. But even if they didn’t have a flourishing author at their helm, the fact that these websites are built using a blogging platform, their general make-up are inviting to the search engine spiders who recognise that they should be providing lots of new material to index.

Therefore blogs are crawled far more frequently than websites. It stands to reason: would you prefer to visit a party that is always lively, has brilliant music and has lots of interesting new people to meet? Or would you prefer your auntie’s tea party on Sunday afternoon, with the same macaroons and over-stewed tea, peppered with the same stories you’ve heard countless times?

If you are a budding new start-up business, it’s important to get noticed. By using a blogging platform to create your website, you are taking advantage of the in-built spider invitations located within it. Putting aside the convenience of the CMS (content management system) to make the pages, whenever you update your site, whether in page or post form, it sends out that important signal to the search engines to come and visit. And if you give these busy algorithms the information they are looking for (matching it up to what humans are searching for) then that puts your business in an even higher pedestal.

Successful businesses who began small several years ago probably started with a blog. It is through this medium they gained the recognition and publicity they deserved, by producing lots of new, exciting and relevant material their audiences wanted to read. Because they used a blog to provide this, the search engines caught it up and displayed it in a higher plane than corresponding static websites, and thus their exposure was increased.

You don’t have to start with a fancy, all-singing-and-dancing blogsite from the very beginning. Learn the ropes with the simplest blogging package, and once you’ve got the system under your belt, then transfer everything over to the higher model. It is a very simple process, and provides an excellent grounding to give you the best advantage from the very beginning.

How blogging transformed my world!

Fairy Blog Mother

Once upon a time there was a graphic designer who wanted to promote her website on the net. She went onto Google and typed in something that brought up a list of interesting websites that all offered ways of doing this.

But one stood out amongst the rest. It was bright, vibrant and friendly, and above all, it didn’t look like a website, but somewhere that ‘talked’ to its visitors instead of preaching to them. It looked welcoming, the information it contained was accessible and readable, and there was a lot of it that seemed to go on forever.

The graphic designer started to read, and she learned loads! It was fascinating to her, she had never seen anything like this before. This different kind of website seemed to be giving her all the answers she needed, and it was all so easy to find!

Further scrutinsing offered a button that could be clicked on to receive more information from this website whenever it was published. This seemed too good to be true, and the graphic designer eagerly subscribed. Over the next few weeks she learned so much more, as she devoured the information sent to her inbox.

One of the things she learned was that she needed to have a blog. Having never heard of them, she greedily absorbed everything there was to know about blogs, and soon realised they were wonderful things. She learned that they were much easier to set up than websites, and having struggled over the past couple of months to create her existing website, the graphic designer wished she had known this beforehand.

Time passed as the graphic designer played with her newly created blog, and soon realised that there were other versions available that provided much better results, so she transferred over. After that she never looked back, and eventually abandoned her website as her business expanded into his new world of content management systems. Graphic design was given short shrift and used only as a by-product, as the doors opened into the world of blogging.

The internet yielded a huge quantity of information and instruction, and she learned about marketing via the internet. This was fascinating, as there was so much potential for creating an online business. This was to lead into further education in digital marketing that was to hold her in good stead, and the realisation that blogs had the power to become great websites without all the hassle other website design packages provided was a revelation. Why wasn’t everybody doing this? Surely this was the answer for communicating about businesses online?

So the Fairy Blog Mother was born, albeit in embryonic form. There was still a heck of a lot more to learn, especially if she was to present herself as blogging know-how. And this education is nowhere near its completion – and would be stupid to say that it was. Blogging within digital marketing is a continuously evolving subject, as of course the technology itself is constantly being redeveloped and improved. But we must all start somewhere, and so I am offering some of my knowledge to you for free over the next few months.

I’ve been thinking of the many reasons why we should have a blog, regardless of whether you’re a business or individual or whatever. So far I’ve come up with 62, but will probably add to that with more brainstorming. If you would like to share these with me, watch out for my promotional posts about how to sign up to this new event. I shall look forward to ‘seeing’ you on the other side.

Magic Moment: Make sure your pictures are suitable #1

Fairy Blog Mother: blogging help

Click my logo to ask me a question!

Following on from the previous post about using pictures instead of words in your post, it is important to make sure your pictures have been suitably prepared for your blog. So here is the first of a series of Magic Moments to make sure they are.

Resolution greatly affects an image and how it performs on a website. This is determined by the number of dots per inch (dpi) across the page. There is a vast difference in dpi between web-images and photographs suitable for print, and a lot of digital cameras will provide pictures with high resolution that is not suitable for websites.

Therefore it is important your pictures have the correct resolution so it is not too large for the website to download. A normal web-ready picture is between 72 dpi to 96 dpi – anything larger than that will be delayed in appearing on your page, or may even be rejected by WordPress if it is too large.

Picture pixels and resolutionsResolution affects the number of pixels of an image, as a smaller resolution will result in a smaller picture. I know that the ultimate width for my pictures on this blog is 18cm, which is 510 pixels in 72 dpi, and anything larger will overhang into the sidebars. You will also find out the appropriate width for other sizes of pictures that have wrapped text around them.

You can adapt your pictures using appropriate software that provides you with this information, such as Photoshop Elements.

An example of how regularly updating succeeds

Fairy Blog Mother: blogging help

Fairy Blog Mother

I have a good friend whose business is doing extremely well. This is very good news, and I was intrigued to know her secret.

It all boils down to interaction, updating and communication with her customers through social networking and her website. I know this website is all about blogging, but she has accomplished the same concept within another form of social media, in this case Facebook.

Using social media is all about being social. It means coming down to the same level as your customers, understanding how they think, what they want, what they do, reacting to their input, appreciating their stories, joining in with them so they get them to know, like and trust you.

Only then can you selectively start to talk about your business in their terms, acknowledge their problems, offer suitable solutions in the form of free top tips, set up a competition, post up new ideas and observations, promote a special offer and provide information about new products and services. All this should be done in the customers’ point of view, beneficial, helpful and definitely without any hint of sales.

Being young and dynamic my friend has amassed several hundreds of Facebook followers, and having a brilliant business brain she understands she needs to regularly respond to them. She gets her staff to check her Facebook Group daily, and personally interacts with her friends’ messages, questions, comments and general postings.

She communicates like any other Facebook-user, posting up pictures of her successes, and tags testimonials from ecstatic customers who are happy to show off what she has done for them. It is the sharing element with each follower on an equal level that makes her so accessible, approachable and social.

And then she applies this concept to her website. (Now we have an affinity with blogging.) It is updated daily with suitable material gathered from her Facebook Group, plus more professional material about her business and what it offers. Here she goes into more detail about the services she provides, the products she uses, her weekly special offers, her chosen product or service of the month and the newest testimonials she has collected.

It is the daily updating of her website that causes it to firmly occupy its No 1 slot in Google, which confirms why the majority of her new customers find her through it. It is almost like she treats her website like a blog, which of course stimulates the search engines to regularly visit it to find out what’s new. Most websites aren’t visited for several weeks or even months, since they hardly ever change their content, but a dynamic website like this one would attract a lot of attention from spiders, hungry for new stuff to index. And they would have probably been boosted through links from her Facebook Group, which is also regularly crawled for the same reasons.

So this is why I recommend blogging for the same results. Blogs are easier to update than websites, due to the platform they are written in, and can create steady traffic back via links to your website. But it is the regularity of the updating, the relevance of the content, the succinct usage of popular keywords plus an understanding of the audience by producing material they want to read, that will really make a difference in the end.

Why should you have a blog?

Fairy Blog Mother: blogging help

Fairy Blog Mother

Everyone should know that a blog is a medium for expression. It is somewhere you can download all the ideas and concepts you cannot add into your website, and of course a cluttered website that includes absolutely everything is not good practice.

This is where a blog comes to the rescue. Here you can provide all that extra information and material for your customers in a much more accessible format. A blog is perfect for communicating your vision, objectives, aspirations, focus and achievements in a friendly and informative method, designed to be more comprehensible to your readers. Remember to reach out to your audience on a regular basis, especially since consistent posting is an important factor that contributes towards your blog’s success.

Use your blog to write material that will influence the people within your industry; somewhere to publish examples of your expertise, knowledge, research and points of view. If you are asked the same questions over and over again by your customers, why not write your response in a post so more people will be able to read your answer. If you read a competitor’s report that sparks off a particular reaction, why not respond to it appropriately or provide your solution to the scenario, so that your customers get to see your side of the story.

Blogging is a highly suitable method of striking up a dialogue with past, present and prospective customers. There is no reason why your post can’t resurrect an old contact, reassure your customers they’re using the right company, or influence possible new recruits to check you out with a view to doing business. Using the interactive properties of blogging to engage in conversations with your readers will stimulate search engine indexing who view comments as valid new material.

Taking advantage of this wonderful medium, so ripe with possibilities for communicating, influencing, interacting, educating and entertaining, is an opportunity that should not be missed.

Worried about blogging? Start slowly with WordPress.com

Fairy Blog Mother: blogging help

Fairy Blog Mother

I regularly read blogs that praise WordPress and say what a fantastic blogging platform it is. But generally it is WordPress.org they are talking about, the sophisticated version that is independently hosted, and can perform in total synchrony with your website, or even become your whole website!

refers to .com blog

Unfortunately you need to pay to host it, it needs someone who understands how to build it and it can take a long time to set up. Even so, once completed, the results are totally professional, it collaborates extremely successfully with search engines, and is very much worthwhile the expenditure.

But this doesn’t help the blogging sceptics. There are plenty out there that are uncomfortable about starting a blog, are not sure of the expense, their business may have only have a budget, or they would like to find out more about WordPress before making a commitment.

Enter WordPress.com, the ‘free’ version hosted by WordPress that can be set up in minutes. Its minimal expenses are to activate Akismet, the ‘spam eater’, and if you want to convert the URL WordPress gives you to one of your own.

Here is a blogging platform ideally suited to enable you to ‘practice’ blogging before embarking into this social networking world. By creating a WordPress.com blog you will be able to learn how to fully use the platform, discover all the tricks there are available, excel in the intricacies of blogging and enjoy producing a fully-operational blog with the minimum of fuss.

OK, there are some restrictions: you can’t advertise or sell from a WordPress.com blog, as the blog police will close you down. Only certain forms of HTML code are accepted (RSS, YouTube videos, podcasts, etc) so it is not a medium to make money. This kind of blog should be used only to education, entertain and publicise your business.

But if you want to create a blog to practice blogging or somewhere to dip your toe into the blogging world before expanding into more elaborate and profitable realms, then WordPress.com is the answer.

And remember, if you want to eventually create a WordPress.org blog in the future, it is extremely easy to transfer the contents of your WordPress.com blog over to it without losing a thing! After all, they are run by the same people!

If you want to know how to set up a WordPress.com blog, my visual e-courses are available free on this website. Just click here to make a blog or explore the links on my sidebar.

How to succeed in business with a British blog

Fairy Blog Mother: blogging help

Fairy Blog Mother

For what I can gather, a business blog is still a relatively new phenomenon in the UK.  I don’t know whether it’s because of scepticism, lack of understanding, fear of technology, inability to see the potential, or just unable to take up the trend, but the mention of blogging still receives an adverse response from the uninitiated.

It is a bit of a Catch22 situation: until a business takes up blogging they won’t start to see the benefits, but if their target audience isn’t necessarily reading blogs or understand what they are, all these efforts could be going to waste.

Nevertheless the message I want to get across is not to give up!  It is imperative to educate the rest of the business world that blogging does work, is vitally important for creating business, will give you increased traffic to your website and other resources, makes it much easier to interact and communicate with followers and potential customers, and actively contributes to search engine indexes to spread the word about what these businesses can provide.

We can overcome this apathy to blogging by persisting in blogging – by actually performing this activity we can show its benefits, publicise the results, broadcast our successes, relate our case studies, and hopefully educate others to do the same.

It is the mindset of consistent posting that should be ingrained in the business world. So many blogs start up only to be abandoned, neglected and forgotten. For a blog to work its owners should want to blog, actively encouraged by mentors and follow bloggers – and this also means the readers need to comment and interact with the writers.

It is imperative that there is a visible response, an obvious indication that others are reading and responding, as this then sparks enthusiasm for the blog’s authors to produce more posts, thus leading to more interaction, and so the blog develops.

So for blogging to thrive in the UK, it needs everyone involved to pull his or her finger out. We need more blogs revived, more scintillating posts, more readers responding, more feeds to social networks, more sharing of posts – in fact far more action and interaction if your British blog is going to compete with the rest of the world!

Visual review of visage silhouette blog

My silhouette by Sarah

Sarah gave me permission to review her blog quite some time ago, and I have been procrastinating ever since.

The reason is, I have been studying her blog and I’ve been a bit confused. Why? Because it is done by someone who has impeccable taste, a wonderful eye for detail, a fantastic niche with superb examples, a wild sense of flair and dainty presentation, all stemming from such an incredible gift.

Yet, not meaning to offend Sarah, the result looks a bit haphazard.

This is a very full blog (click on the image to access it), more like a blogsite. There is a homepage (see above) and lots of carefully constructed accompanying pages, plus a blog post section. It is, in fact, Sarah’s second website which allows her to post up new material, pictures and events news at her convenience, without destroying the ambiance of her beautiful official website.

Therefore I note that in the sidebar she has a video and a gallery squashed in – extremely valuable in marketing terms, as this caters for her visually inclined readers as well as the literary ones – and further down she has taken my advice and added in links to her social media profiles and a Twitter badge showing her latest tweets.

But the squashed presentation doesn’t do the video and gallery justice, giving the impression they were popped there as an afterthought, when I know certainly isn’t the case. Sarah wants her audience to see them on every page (a fact possible with sidebars). My solution would be to find a theme that provided a much wider sidebar and a narrower text area, which, being so wide, makes her webcopy appear unsculptured and unprofessional, something Sarah’s business is not.

There is also a distinct lack of wide margins and column gutters, all contributing towards white space which is so vital to enable a design to ‘breathe’.  The same principle applies around pictures and other visual points. Maybe because this blog is hosted by Blogger, which is, trying not to appear biased towards WordPress, a more limited platform for good themes and other available applications.

The alternative would be to put a larger window of her video (presumably it’s hosted on YouTube.com where they will provide the necessary code to do this) on a separate page or on her homepage in pride of place. Similarly with the rotating gallery, which I note does link to a separate site to allow bigger, clearer pictures.

Sarah’s posts are varied and interesting (keep them coming, consistent new material is vital for a blog), but there is no date to show when they were posted. If updating is not frequent, then perhaps this is a good thing. I also note there are no reference to tags and categories, both which are suitable for search engine optimisation reasons.

The sidebar also omits widgets to show her latest posts, recent comments, list of categories for archives, and, most importantly, no subscription button or form. Submitting your blog to Feedburner.com get a RSS URL and therefore providing your audience a chance to subscribe to new posts either via email or search engine reader, is another missed opportunity to get wider coverage and therefore more traffic back to her website. The RSS URL is also used to submit your blog to social networking websites and blog directories, allowing links which automatically update when a new post is published.

One thing that is superfluous on the sidebar is the sitemap or list of pages. There are already links to your other pages under the top banner. This space could host the RSS feed and subscription mechanisms instead. But I do approve of the image links at the bottom of the sidebar, either leading to further resources or other specialised websites. Make sure there are links back to the blog from these sites for best results.

Why do you need a blog?

Fairy Blog Mother

It’s amazing how many businesses don’t have a blog, or if they do, it lies neglected and forgotten. Only recently I helped resuscitate a website by rewriting the copy to bring back the customer focus. One of the links went to something that was called a blog, but hardly resembled one…

It’s great that they had a blog, but it’s certainly not good to misuse it. To them it was a page where reference points were listed, or articles were recorded. Hmm, apart from being very boring, it certainly didn’t encourage visitor interaction, which is what blogs are all about.

Blogs are all about increasing the visibility of your business online. It is an extra place on the web that allows a different and wider audience to find out more about you. It is an extremely flexible medium that enables a business to express themselves outside the rigid format of a brochure website. Within its pages you can show off your expertise, explain areas of your business in either greater detail or in a more sociable and communicative method to encourage visitor response. You are able to let your hair down, take off your tie or kick off your heels, and really show social media what you’re made of.

Now we’re entering the second decade of the millennium, the way business is done online is changing. Social networking is rising, and business practices are taking it on board within their marketing strategies. Gone are the days of stiff presentations, say hello to more social interaction, making way for customer’s and reader’s comments, feedback, suggestions, questions, even their own content. A blog is certainly one method of achieving this, using technology that is improving all the time to increase the easiness of use, friendliness of action and encouragement of participation.

So my next task is to carefully educate this website’s business to start using their blog again, making them understand its true purpose so it can perform effectively. It’s lack of knowledge about social media that result in poor management of online marketing tools, and this blog aims to rectify this as soon as possible. Watch this space…