How Social Media helps to grow the Small Business 

The business press is full of stories about how small companies are using social channels to attract and engage customers. But while there are plenty of individual success stories, the confidence in what to do specifically is not always clear for small business owners that are strapped for time and online marketing resources.

Case study:

I was talking with a small business owner recently who was lamenting not updating his website and also that his competition was showing up “all over the place” online.  The nature of his product requires some education and an effort to dispel common misperceptions. The rapid advancements in technology of his particular product category are not very well known amongst his target consumer market. But there’s a substantial amount of search volume and interest in the solutions his product provides.  He’s also a small business with limited time and budget.

To me, this was a classic opportunity for the power of influence through storytelling.

My tip for him was to start a blog that answered the most common questions prospects and customers ask.  And to do so in a compelling way that his competitors were not:  with video, images and text. Each new blog post would be another potential entry point to his website via Google and social networks where people share links. With 1 post a week, he’d have 52 more pages and videos on his website in a year, each offering interesting, useful content that could position him above the competitors. Along the way, he’d be able to gather insight from web analytics, social shares, comments and interactions with the blog posts to refine message effectiveness.

A few key questions to start with his blog content plan:

• Why do current customers buy your product? This can come from sales people and/or the business owner.
• What are the misperceptions & objections? Document the things that are educational opportunities.
• What type of information helps them change the perception?  What are the tipping points from skepticism to confidence? Is it demonstration, 3rd party data, credibility of the company, word of mouth?
• Where do prospects look for information on this solution? Talk to sales people, look at website stats and any logged information about lead sources.

By answering these fundamental questions, this small business owner can create a blog content plan that specifically addresses the questions, concerns and triggers that will influence prospects to trust, buy and refer.  Understanding the key features of the product most relevant to the target customer as well as prospect tendencies towards finding a solution of this type can literally translate into topics for him to write or talk about on the blog.

Those topics can be run through Google AdWords Keyword Tool to identify the keyword phrases that people are searching for most often. Relevant search phrases can inspire blog post and YouTube video titles, categories, descriptions and tags.

Some basic next steps might include:

Set up a WordPress Blog, template and hosting (Genesis, StudioPress & Synthesis make this a no-brainer). Plan to write one blog post or publish/upload 1 video per week (2-3 minutes) that answers a key question prospects and customers ask.  The video can be captured using an iPhone or other smartphone and iMovie can be used for editing. If you’re on PC, you can use Windows Movie Maker to edit the video.  For people not comfortable just talking to a camera, have an employee ask the question(s) and answer them while being captured on video.

Create a YouTube Channel and start connecting with other channels and video publishers on relevant topics, 5-10 min a day. After uploading a video, embed on the blog, and share on existing social channels like Twitter and Facebook as well as through email to existing customers or opt-in prospect list. Ashley posted some great examples of SMB Twitter promotion yesterday. When embedding the video on the blog, write a description of what is talked about in the video so search engines can make it easy for people to find.

The initial focus for a basic video and photo blog should be on getting used to the habit of creating useful content on a regular basis.  I know many readers might be thinking that more substantial SEO and social media tactics should be setup as well, but without good content, social networking and optimization won’t work to convert prospects to customers anyway.  Time is usually limited for small businesses, so getting a small base of content built is a great starting point.

Creating a cycle of listening for questions, answering them through content and refinement can go a very long way for small business content marketing. Once things are setup, 20-30 minutes per day can be spent interacting with blog comments and social networks. Establishing a feedback loop means you’ll always have ideas to blog or talk about. It also means you’re connecting with real people, interacting with them and providing something of value that they can share and act on.

In time other promotion channels can be added starting with Facebook, Twitter and Google+ as well as SEO best practices with more specific keyword research and link building. If the initial customer research identifies Twitter as a substantial opportunity, a Twitter Marketing strategy might be involved at the same time the blog and YouTube channel are created. The reason I’m keeping these suggestions simple and basic is that I know how much small business owners can get overwhelmed. Needs to grow outside online marketing consultants or training can always be used to speed up things up.

What else? An email newsletter that re-purposes blog content and the Q/A that happens on Facebook, the blog and Twitter can be delivered to existing customers. Viewing every channel of participation as an opportunity to interact and share will help grow networks, trust and credibility as the “go to source” for the product category being promoted. It’s important to create value, but also to not lose sight that this is business. Don’t be afraid to suggest solutions or promote offers. Just do so in a relevant way.

Finally, make sure web analytics (Google Analytics is free) and basic social media monitoring (Trackur starts at $18/mo, search.twitter.com is free) are set up to assess how people are finding and interacting with blog content. Watch for trends in network growth like fans, friends and followers but especially with quality of interaction through comments, likes, shares and the effect on blog/website traffic that drives inquiries and sales.

For a lot of small business owners not used to online marketing, SEO or social media, these suggestions might be out of their comfort zone. But with the way consumer behaviors are changing and increased competition, getting out of the comfort zone and into a place where direct customer interactions drive content and inspire business outcomes is an essential investment.

Source: www.toprankblog.com

Six Hurdles to Bloggers

When Choosing the Blogging Applications….

Choosing the blogging applications can be confusing because on the surface, the various blogging software products such as Wordpress, Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, LiveJournal and more are quite similar.

Following are six questions to ask yourself before you select your blogging applications to help you make the best choice to be a successful blogger.

1. What Are Your Goals for Your Blog?

Do you want to blog for fun or are you trying to make money or build a popular, highly-trafficked blog? The blogging application you choose is largely dependent upon your goals for your blog. Ask yourself the following questions to determine your goals for your blog:

• How much space will you need to store your blog's images and content?
• Do you want to display ads on your blog?
• Do you want to add forums and other features to your blog?

2. Do You Need to Significantly Customize Your Blog's Design?

Blogging application varies in terms of its ability to allow bloggers to customize the appearance and layout of their blogs with logos, specific fonts, designs and more. It's important that you determine the amount of customization you want and need for your blog before you select your blogging application.

3. Are You or Is Someone You Know Technical?

Different blogging application platforms require varying amounts of technical skill and knowledge. While there are blogging application options that even the most technically-challenged people can navigate and use successfully, many of the blogging application packages that provide advanced customization and features require at least some technical ability.

4. Will Your Blog Have Multiple Authors?

Some blogging application platforms are easier to configure with multiple authors than others. Determine your author needs before you choose your blogging application.

5. Do You Need Custom Email Addresses Tied to Your Blog's Domain Name?

If you want to have email addresses customized to match your blog's domain name than your blogging application options are more limited. Even if this is something you may not need in the short term, it's important to think about it now before you choose your blogging application.

6. Do You Have Money to Spend Each Month on Blogging application and a Blog Host?

Your budget will have a significant impact on the blogging application you choose. While there are many free blogging application platforms available online, those free blogging programs typically offer limited features. Although those limited features are usually adequate for the average blogger, they may not be enough for your blog depending on your long term goals for it.

Source:  weblogs.about.com

Five Technical Things Every Blogger Should Know

Where 15 years ago, having a Web site was something of a badge of neediness, today having a site doesn’t require much technical knowledge at all. Someone with almost no technical expertise can set up an account on WordPress.com or Blogger and be blogging within minutes.

However, this doesn’t mean that a blogger can get away with being a technical dunce. Though getting words on the Internet is pretty simple, building and growing a blog does require one to know a bit more than how to flip on a PC. Social networking sites make it easy to get online, but blogging, especially over the long haul, takes something more.

So what are those things that every blogger should know? There are many, definitely more than what is on this list, but here are five things every would-be blogger should know before, or at least shortly after, getting started.

1. The Basics of the Web

The Internet is a pretty amazing thing. Data travels all across the world on the back of a system that, when explained correctly, seems like it should never work. It’s both breathtakingly complicated and brilliantly simple at the same time.

Though a blogger doesn’t need to understand every technical detail about how the Web does its thing, a basic understanding of how a browser goes from a “.com” and then loads a site is probably a good idea. This should include at least a basic understanding of how domains are registered, how DNS works and how data gets from A to B on the Web.

One doesn’t need to know how the TCP handshake works, but a fundamental understanding of the “big picture” when it comes to Web infrastructure is pretty useful.

Even a basic understanding of the workings of the Web can help you be a better blogger. 

First, if you go to set up your own hosting, you’re going to need some of that understanding to make everything work and understand the process of setting up your own domain.

However, even if you host with a free site, it can help you understand site outages, how to speed up your blog and why visitors often have very different experiences based upon their location.

2. How a Web Server Works

Similar to the Web itself, a server is a thing of beauty. How a machine receives contact from the Web at large, processes the data and then returns a response is both a simple and an amazing thing. On most blogs this process involves the use of several different programs, operating in several different layers and working in tandem to pull together the information requested and present it in a human-readable format.

To make matters even more complicated, one physical server can, and often does, run hundreds, even thousands of different Web sites. It is even common for one physical 

machine to house several different virtual machines within it.

Though one doesn’t have to be ready to manage their own server to run a blog, understanding the basics of how it works can prove infinitely useful.

First and foremost, a basic understanding of a server will help you set up your blog so that it works with the hardware, not against it. It helps you understand how WP Super Cache can improve the performance of a site and what you can do to keep your site running quickly.

However, perhaps more importantly, it helps you understand communications from your host. Knowing the basics of how a server works will help you better grasp what went wrong when your site goes down, how bad it is and also enable you to ask smarter questions of your support team.

3. Basic HTML (And Maybe PHP)

If you’re used to using nothing but a word processor, HTML code can look very intimidating as it comes with strange symbols and syntax that can look like an alien language. Many understandably confuse markup language for programming language and do everything they can to avoid even looking at it.

Fortunately though, HTML is not nearly as complicated as it looks at first glance and most of the code one would need for blogging is very basic. However, not knowing it can be very costly.

Though WYSIWYG editors are much better now than they were just a few years ago, they are still not perfect. At some point, if you are going to get something to look how you want it to, you’re going to need to get your hands dirty at least a little bit.

Also, if you’re using a self-hosted WordPress installation you may want to have at least enough understanding of PHP so that you aren’t intimidated if you have to make a few changes, as it is a part of updating and customizing many themes.

However, even if you don’t customize your theme at all, the first time your table isn’t aligned exactly right or the text doesn’t wrap correctly around an image correctly, you’re going to want to have the basic knowledge to fall back on.

W3Schools has a great basic overview of HTML and is also a great reference for those who know (but sometimes forget). Likewise, Tizag has a good overview of PHP.

4. Image Compression/Sizing

Image compression is something of a black art and even those who are veterans will argue over the finer points about it. What file type to use (GIF, JPG or PNG), how much to compress and the size of an image are often areas of intense debate among the Web-savvy.

However, there are still some things one should never do as they can cause problems and knowing how to avoid the pitfalls is critical when running a blog.

If you don’t compress your images correctly, you can wind up with a Web page that is many times the size it should be. A logo that is 100 K will slow even broadband visitors down. Couple of poorly-compressed background and some heavy inline images and your visitors may be leaving before reading a single word.

It is important to keep your site as lean as practical and a big part of that is keeping your images down to a reasonable size.

5. Online Security

The Web can be a very dangerous place and keeping yourself safe on it is vitally important for everyone, not just bloggers.

Online security can involve everything from not posting your personal information to making sure your operating system is patched. It is about keeping you, your data and the information of those close to you as safe as reasonably possible.

Though there is no way one can be completely secured on the Web, there are definitely things one can do to ensure that they are as protected as possible.

Online security is important for everyone, whether they blog or not. However, bloggers face additional challenges in this area. Having a site not only gives attackers a new target, but also new openings. Blogging systems can be hacked, servers can be broken into and sites can be shut down.

Online security for bloggers includes everything from keeping software up to date, backing up data, not putting critical information your server and choosing good passwords. It’s a wide swath of items to cover but all of it is vitally important.

Last but not the least….

In the end, you don’t have to be a geek in order to run a blog, but a little bit of technical knowledge will go a very long way. A basic understanding of some critical technology will help make you a better blogger and make it easier for you to grow your site and expand on the Web.

If you don’t have this knowledge now, taking the time to develop a basic understanding will serve you well, especially in the long run.

Source: www.blogherald.com

Blogging – An Overview

A blog is a personal journal published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete entries ("posts") typically displayed in reverse chronological order so the most recent post appears first. Blogs are usually the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often are themed on a single subject. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

The emergence and growth of blogs in the late 1990s coincided with the advent of web publishing tools that facilitated the posting of content by non-technical users.  Previously knowledge of such technologies as HTML and FTP had been required to publish content on the Web.

Although not a must, most good quality blogs are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments and even message each other via GUI widgets on the blogs and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other static websites. In that sense, blogging can be seen as a form of social networking. Indeed, bloggers do not only produce content to post on their blogs but also build social relations with their readers and other bloggers.

Many blogs provide commentary on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries; yet still others function more as online brand advertising of a particular individual or company. 

A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability of readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (art blog), photographs (photo blog), videos (video blogging or vlogging), music (MP3 blog), and audio (podcasting). Micro blogging is another type of blogging, featuring very short posts.

As of 16 February 2011, there were over 156 million public blogs in existence.

History

The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997. The short form, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May 1999. Shortly thereafter, Evan Williams at Pyra Labs used "blog" as both a noun and verb ("to blog," meaning "to edit one's weblog or to post to one's weblog") and devised the term "blogger" in connection with Pyra Labs' Blogger product, leading to the popularization of the terms.

Backgrounds

Before blogging became popular, digital communities took many forms, including Usenet, commercial online services such as GEnie, BiX and the early CompuServe, e-mail lists and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). In the 1990s, Internet forum software, created running conversations with "threads." Threads are topical connections between messages on a virtual "corkboard."

The modern blog evolved from the online diary, where people would keep a running account of their personal lives. Most such writers called themselves diarists, journalists, or journalers. Justin Hall, who began personal blogging in 1994 while a student at Swarthmore College, is generally recognized as one of the earlier bloggers, as is Jerry Pournelle. Dave Winer's Scripting News is also credited with being one of the older and longer running weblogs.  

Another early blog was Wearable Wireless Webcam, an online shared diary of a person's personal life combining text, video, and pictures transmitted live from a wearable computer and EyeTap device to a web site in 1994. This practice of semi-automated blogging with live video together with text was referred to as sousveillance, and such journals were also used as evidence in legal matters.

Early blogs were simply manually updated components of common Web sites. However, the evolution of tools to facilitate the production and maintenance of Web articles posted in reverse chronological order made the publishing process feasible to a much larger, less technical, population. Ultimately, this resulted in the distinct class of online publishing that produces blogs we recognize today. For instance, the use of some sort of browser-based software is now a typical aspect of "blogging". Blogs can be hosted by dedicated blog hosting services, or they can be run using blog software, or on regular web hosting services.

Some early bloggers, such as The Misanthropic Bitch, who began in 1997, actually referred to their online presence as a zine, before the term blog entered common usage.

Types of Blogs

There are many different types of blogs, differing not only in the type of content, but also in the way that content is delivered or written.

Personal blogs

The personal blog, an ongoing diary or commentary by an individual, is the traditional, most common blog. Personal bloggers usually take pride in their blog posts, even if their blog is never read. Blogs often become more than a way to just communicate; they become a way to reflect on life, or works of art. Blogging can have a sentimental quality. Few personal blogs rise to fame and the mainstream but some personal blogs quickly garner an extensive following. One type of personal blog, referred to as a micro blog, is extremely detailed and seeks to capture a moment in time. Some sites, such as Twitter, allow bloggers to share thoughts and feelings instantaneously with friends and family, and are much faster than emailing or writing.

Corporate and organizational blogs

A blog can be private, as in most cases, or it can be for business purposes. Blogs used internally to enhance the communication and culture in a corporation or externally for marketing, branding or public relations purposes are called corporate blogs. Similar blogs for clubs and societies are called club blogs, group blogs, or by similar names; typical use is to inform members and other interested parties of club and member activities.

By genre

Some blogs focus on a particular subject, such as political blogs, health blogs, travel blogs (also known as travelogs), gardening blogs, house blogs, fashion blogs, project blogs, education blogs, niche blogs, classical music blogs, quizzing blogs and legal blogs (often referred to as a blawgs) or dreamlogs. Two common types of genre blogs are art blogs and music blogs. A blog featuring discussions especially about home and family is not uncommonly called a mom blog and one made popular is by Erica Diamond who created Womenonthefence.com which is syndicated to over two million readers monthly. While not a legitimate type of blog, one used for the sole purpose of spamming is known as a Splog.

By media type

A blog comprising videos is called a vlog, one comprising links is called a linklog, a site containing a portfolio of sketches is called a sketch blog or one comprising photos is called a photo blog. Blogs with shorter posts and mixed media types are called tumblelogs. Blogs that are written on typewriters and then scanned are called typecast or typecast blogs; see typecasting (blogging).

A rare type of blog hosted on the Gopher Protocol is known as a Phlog.

By device

Blogs can also be defined by which type of device is used to compose it. A blog written by a mobile device like a mobile phone or PDA could be called a moblog. One early blog was Wearable Wireless Webcam, an online shared diary of a person's personal life combining text, video, and pictures transmitted live from a wearable computer and EyeTap device to a web site. This practice of semi-automated blogging with live video together with text was referred to as sousveillance. Such journals have been used as evidence in legal matters.

Reverse blog

A Reverse Blog is composed by its users rather than a single blogger. This system has the characteristics of a blog, and the writing of several authors. These can be written by several contributing authors on a topic, or opened up for anyone to write. There is typically some limit to the number of entries to keep it from operating like a Web Forum.

Consumer-generated advertising in blogs

Consumer-generated advertising is a relatively new and controversial development and it has created a new model of marketing communication from businesses to consumers. Among the various forms of advertising on blog, the most controversial are the sponsored posts.  These are blog entries or posts and may be in the form of feedback, reviews, opinion, videos, etc. and usually contain a link back to the desired site using a keyword/s.

Blogs have led to some disinter-mediation and a breakdown of the traditional advertising model where companies can skip over the advertising agencies (previously the only interface with the customer) and contact the customers directly themselves. On the other hand, new companies specialized in blog advertising have been established, to take advantage of this new development as well.

However, there are many people who look negatively on this new development. Some believe that any form of commercial activity on blogs will destroy the blogosphere’s credibility.

Code of Conducts for Bloggers

The Blogger's Code of Conduct is a proposal by Tim O'Reilly for bloggers to enforce civility on their blogs by being civil themselves and moderating comments on their blog. The code was proposed due to threats made to blogger Kathy Sierra. The idea of the code was first reported by BBC News, who quoted O'Reilly saying, "I do think we need some code of conduct around what is acceptable behavior, I would hope that it doesn't come through any kind of regulation it would come through self-regulation."

O'Reilly and others came up with a list of seven proposed ideas:

• Take responsibility not just for your own words, but for the comments you allow on your blog.
• Label your tolerance level for abusive comments.
• Consider eliminating anonymous comments.
• Ignore the trolls.
• Take the conversation offline, and talk directly, or find an intermediary who can do so.
• If you know someone who is behaving badly, tell them so.
• Don't say anything online that you wouldn't say in person.

Source: en.wikipedia.org