The Proof Fairy » blogging for business

A 4sight in a very grand setting!

Alison — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 15:59:58 +0000

I gave my 4sight on Blogging for Business another run out today – at 4N Reading-not-Henley, so called (by me) as it was the Reading meeting, but being held in Henley at the Town Hall! The meeting was held in a very grand room and I felt quite honoured to speak in front of about 25 people in such a salubrious setting!

I start my presentation by mentioning research by internet marketing company Hubspot, who found that websites that have a blog get around 55% more traffic than websites that don’t. I find that statistic quite staggering, especially when their research counted a blog as being as few as two posts … imagine how much traffic you could get if you blog every week!

During the presentation I give 7 tips on how to blog successfully. In brief the tips are:

Work out what you want your blog to achieve – Attract new visitors? Engage with clients? SEO? Share your expertise? A personal record? Or all of the above!
Choose your platform carefully – There are over 100,all with strengths and weaknesses, and it’s not so easy to change once you’ve started.
Update your blog regularly – Let search engines and visitors know your business is alive and kicking!
Be creative with content – Include case studies, news, guest bloggers, videos, tips and more
Write for people – not for London Taxi drivers! – Focus on keywords – but don’t spam them! Use them in the title, URL, heading and 2-3 times in the body copy, no more.
Attract an audience and make your message viral – Post exciting, entertaining content that people will want to share – and make it easy for them to do so!
Follow the Bloggers Code of Conduct – Remember everything on your blog is a representation of you – so be authentic!

It seemed to go down really well with the people present and I had lots of interesting conversations with people afterwards about the benefits of blogging. It really is a hugely effective and relatively cheap (or even free!) marketing tool. Are you blogging yet? I’d love to hear your blogging tips!

Why having an online presence is essential for all businesses

Alison — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 07:14:04 +0000

Having been online myself since 1996, the Internet is a huge part of my life, and I can’t remember how life was before it – or imagine how I’d cope without it! However, I’m continually coming across people – and, more often, businesses – who aren’t online and who certainly aren’t using social media within their marketing mix.

The worst case scenario is businesses who don’t have any kind of web presence at all. Now for me personally, when I want to find contact details for a company, or check out a restaurant, or find someone to supply me with a product, the first place I go is Google. And if that company has no presence at all, or shows up in the Yell listings but doesn’t have a link to a website, then the chances of me using them are tiny. I’ll always keep looking till I find a business with a website. Why? Because it means I can research them before I contact them and already feel I have a relationship with them before the business transaction even begins.

So for me, companies lose out on business completely through not having a web presence. But how much are they affected by not using social media to promote themselves?

Going by the video below, hugely. Even if you take the statistics with a large pinch of salt they do a great job of showing how vital the various forms of social media have become to everyday life.

For businesses, the statistics about the effectiveness of advertising in particular are worth taking note of. Only 14% of people trust advertisements. Only 18% of traditional TV ad campaigns make a positive ROI. 78% of us trust the recommendations of our peers. And how are those recommendations communicated? Through social media, of course. Through people blogging about your products, tweeting the links to friends, discussing your service on Facebook. The web in general, and blogs, Facebook and Twitter in particular, have taken over from traditional advertising - and you will lose out if you’re not part of the sopcial media party.

If you’re not using the web and social media to promote your business you ARE going to get left behind. If you’re not convinced of that, watch the video below. If you want to join the social media revolution and use it to grow your business, email me and ask me how!

7 ideas for your business blog

Alison — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 10:41:42 +0000

Blogging for business is a fabulous way to promote your website, because it keeps the content fresh and that attracts new visitors, keeps people coming back for more AND lets the search engines know your website is active. But inspiration often dries up after the first few posts – so what can you blog about? Here are some ideas to keep you blogging!

Blog about new products: Have you just started offering a new service or product? Blog about it! Write about the benefits to your potential customers, and then tweet about the new post or promote it on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Blog about companies you work with: We all use a variety of services to help us run our business. Why not blog about a good experience you’ve had with another company? Not only will it increase traffic to your own site, but if you let the other business know about your post, they might blog about you in return!

Blog about relevant stories in the news: Keep an eye on relevant industry news stories and blog about them. These are easy posts to make – so long as you link back to the original article, you can copy and paste the most interesting sections and just add a comment to give your own spin to the story.

Blog in pictures or, better still, in video: Videos on YouTube receive over 2 BILLION views A DAY, and more and more businesses are seeing the benefits of promoting through video. Make a video about your business, post it on your blog and add it to Youtube . You can film a process you do online, speak to camera about an area of your business that will help others, or even find a relevant video and comment on that.Failing that, use photos relevant to your business to brighten up a post.

Blog about what you’re up to: If you’ve been working on an interesting project, or with a new client, the story can make an interesting blog article. You’ll probably want to check that your client is happy for you to talk about them, but so long as you give them a link back to their website most people won’t mind!

Blog your knowledge: We all have information about our particular industry that we can share. Give some of it away in a blog post! Try writing a “top tips” list like this one, or sharing a couple of “industry secrets”.

Blog on other people’s blogs: This one is harder to organise but try striking up friendships with other bloggers in complementary industries, offer to write on their blog – and ask them to blog for you too! “Guest blogging” is becoming very common now – it gives your blog a fresh perspective and you’ll get the guest blogger’s fans coming over to your blog to see what’s going on!

I hope these ideas will give you plenty of inspiration your own blog. Please do leave me a comment if you use any of them, and I’d love to see what you’ve written!

Blogging for Business: video advert!

Alison — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 10:57:24 +0000

My first foray into video blogging – this is also on YouTube and I hope it will capture a % or two of the 2 billion+ views every day! The music’s a little cheesy but the message is there

Thanks to Maximum Marketing for creating this!

Blogging for business – are you doing it?

Alison — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 06:55:20 +0000

Most people have heard of blogging; lots do it. But plenty of businesses don’t realise just how useful a regularly updated blog can be, and now I can help.

So why blog? What benefits will it have to your business? Well to start with, blogging for business is great for improving your search engine ranking. Updating the content regularly means the spiders keep visiting; they know your site is active and that improves your position in the rankings. You can also include plenty of important keywords in your blog posts to improve your position when people search for the services you offer. For example, this article is all about blogging for business; by including a few mentions of it and including “blogging for business” in the URL, it’s likely to score highly when people search for that term.

OK, so keeping an updated blog can improve your search engine ranking which pulls visitors in to your website – and blogging can also keep them coming back. Everyone coming to your site is a potential customer but they may not yet be ready to buy what you offer. If your website is static and nothing ever changes, they aren’t likely to come back again. If you have an informative and entertaining yet educative blog that they can take something from (Lord Reith was talking a lot of sense!) then they are more likely to bookmark you and come back regularly, or perhaps subscribe to your RSS feed so they can see when you update. The more they visit your website, the more they’ll get to know and trust you and the greater the likelihood that it’ll be YOU they do business with when they want what you’re offering.

Of course, the other advantage of blogging for business is that you can engage with your customers in a way that static websites can’t. You can use your blog to introduce new products and services; talk about interesting projects you’ve worked on; give people a glimpse of the person behind the business; or comment on an interesting and relevant news story. Blogging gives your visitors the opportunity to comment and that opens up a conversation between you both, which helps the relationship develop even faster!

Blogging also helps you link up your website with any other social media marketing you’re doing. For example, when you blog you can announce it to the world via your Twitter or Facebook account and that will pull people into your website. You can use your blog articles in your e-newsletter. You can even post your blog articles on other websites, for example 4Networking or Ezine Articles, and that will increase visitors too.

So you can see why blogging for business can be really useful; but what if you don’t have a blog set up and don’t know where to start, or don’t have the time or the inclination to keep one? That’s where I come in. I now offer a couple of blogging packages aimed at small businesses. One provides you with a series of articles you can use on an existing blog; the other includes complete setup and maintenance, as well as regular articles posted on your behalf.

Blogging for business is a great way to promote your company, attract new website visitors and engage with your customers. If you’re not doing it already, why not?!