Back at marketing

WHERE WERE YOU?
Lately I have been writing many posts that follow this theme – sorry for not blogging lately. Lately indeed, actually I have been busy at work for a long time now. I changed my job to a different sales job and now I have been practicing my person-to-person skills and getting up to speed with my new tasks. What a truly wonderful trade selling is, don’t you agree?


IN PREVIOUS POST
Last time that I posted, it seemed to be about service problems over and over again. Since then, Blogger has stabilized and I haven’t noticed many technical disturbances. We managed to get over the hump and get the site online. After the set up it will be more about marketing than technical issues as you go on with building your blog.


SO?
Even though I have not been writing about marketing, I have been reading and testing several marketing tactics and technologies (I don’t even start raving about my marketing and sales training in my new job). On the technology side I can’t really recommend anything to be used with Blogger but Google’s AdSense that most of the time beautifully complements the information that we provide on our site.


COMING POSTS...
You might know a thing or two about marketing and you definitely know just about everything about your business. This leaves us with simple task of getting all that knowledge out to the Internet and in a form that gets noticed with reasonable cost or no cost at all (well, time is money so nothing is free). Now that I am back, I will dedicate time on guiding you on how to present your business on net with a free blog.

Even more service problems

I finally figured out that those previous posts about service problems were still in some kind of error limbo. As I tried to edit them, I kept on getting various error messages. It also limited my posting of new entries. I once again dare to declare these problems to be part of the past and tomorrow I can finally go forward with the program. Justified to full...

More service problems

I rewrote the list of blog marketing tips. It is now much more to the point and doesn’t beat around the bush. Blogger really had some problems today, couldn’t get in for almost 12 hours. On the positive side, all my blogs stayed online, so they weren’t affected. Still fine tuning the graphical layout. This time with “justify full” feature, it should make the text more unified. I’ll be back tomorrow with more small business Internet marketing tips for bloggers.

Service problems

I have been trying to post more, but every time I have had troubles with Blogger performance. Instead of getting performance, I’ve been getting various error messages and nothing has come through. Now trying with this short message first. As an advice, always write your posts in separate word processing program and file your work, in case that service decides to “misplace” some of your data.

Over the hump

Ok, now we are done, the blog is created and all set. We can finally get into more business use specific stuff, but I leave that for tomorrow. Blogger has not been behaving too well today and I have been getting several error messages. I am glad that I finally managed to post these messages.

Rest of the settings

PREVIOUSLY
This is the third and final installation in a three part series (previous articles were How to create a blog and Basic settings) that explains how to create a blog that will do all the necessary internet marketing for your small business or even a company.

In previous installation, we started to cover the Blogger settings, but because of my lengthy, but yet important tip, we only managed to finish the basic menu. Now it is time to go through the rest of those sub menus and finish the blog creation process for your business.


SETTINGS – PUBLISHING
Blog*Spot Address This is the sub domain name that you chose. No need to care about hosting somewhere else, so you can disregard secure FTP for now.
Notify Weblogs.com Choose yes and benefit from notifications for large audience. Whenever you post new information, your readers and potential readers are informed about the update.

Remember to save settings and then republish your blog so that the changes are visible all around your business blog.


SETTINGS – FORMATTING
Show Here you choose how many posts you want to show on the front page of your blog. My opinion is that you should avoid big numbers it is not especially nice, if the front page just continues and continues it is hard to read like that.
Date Header Format Pick the one you like.
Archive Index Date Format As you like.
Timestamp Format Again, pick the one that you prefer.
Time Zone Pretty much depends where you stand in this matter :)
Date Language Up to you.
Encoding This really depends your language area, and what kind of letters you are using to post. Unicode UTF-8 will do fine in most cases.
Convert Line Breaks When you press ENTER or RETURN in editor, it means that the cursor will jump a line.
Show Title Field Yes – makes it easier to type your titles.
Show Link Field If you want that your post title is also a link to somewhere then this is convenient to be - Yes.
Post Template Here you can write something that you always want to add to your post. As you make a new post, this text will always be ready, waiting for you. Signature link to your product or address perhaps?


SETTINGS – COMMENTS
Comments I recommend that you choose comments you might get some feedback
Who Can Comment? Let anyone have his or her say it is easier that way.
Default for Posts New posts should have comments.
Comments Timestamp Format Once again, what is your preference?
Show comments in a popup window? I recommend not using popup window. Comments in the end of a short posts give you more content on your page.
Show profile images on comments? Some people have them, you might want to consider let them use images with yes answer.
Comment Notification Address This is quite important, insert the address where you want to be reminded when somebody leaves a comment on your blog. Answer quickly and get some goodwill.


SETTINGS – ARCHIVING
Archive Frequency It is a good practise to archive monthly.
Enable Post Pages? This is very important to have as Yes individual post pages are easy to link in and promote.


SETTINGS – SITE FEED
Publish Site Feed Yes enables you to distribute content for aggregators and expands your readership.
Descriptions I am on the side of short, because it makes people to come back to your site and see the information on the source. On the other hand, giving full access serves them.
Site Feed URL Remember this in case someone wants to know.


SETTINGS – EMAIL
BlogSend Address Whenever something is published on your blog, this address will be emailed a copy of that post.
Mail-to-Blogger Address Sometimes this function is very useful. It enables you to post a comment by sending an email to the address you choose here. Remember not to use any fancy modifications when using this. HTML doesn’t behave too well when mailed to your blog.


SETTINGS – MEMBERS
Here you can add members to your blog. These people will have rights to post messages to your blog, just as you have. Maybe you want to inform customers with your business partner or give updating rights for you secretary. This is the place to benefit from the efforts of many.

More tuning

Even Blogger is already wonderfully simple publishing tool it can still take quite a lot of time to make the layout to suit one's eye. I strongly suggest to everybody to just go with general templates without any modification. That way you will not be wasting any time from that actual work that you do in your businesses. Now I will get into the latter part of Settings. I try to post it as shortly as possible.

New layout

Great news! As you can see, I changed the layout of the blog. Now it looks more like the dull and boring place it should be. ;)

I hope that the graphical style will help people to focus to the text, as there is so little going on other areas of the blog. Furthermore I have couple of ideas to try out, I test them on my other blogs first so you don’t have to suffer from constant changes and tests.

Important blog marketing tips

Here I have listed the tips that are entangled with the articles. I have rewritten them to be much shorter, but you can still get to the original article by clicking the title of each tip. UPDATED 30.03.2005


DOMAIN NAME
Search engines consider domain and sub domain names very highly. You should choose your domain name according to the information that leads people to your website. Don’t just use your company name, but include some related search terms. Joe’s Pizza could add something about the service, product or location to make it Joe’s Pizza Delivery, Joe’s Oven Pizza or Austin Joe’s Pizza.


TITLE AND DESCRIPTION
Search engines and directories use titles and descriptions to organize and present information. These fields should give factual information about your business. Add at least what you do and the name of your company. Be specific and avoid superlatives. It is always good idea to give location. These steps help with search engines but also with people, as they are looking for specific information, not a specific company.

Basic settings

INTRODUCTION
Blog creation is now successfully completed. I took a short brake from posting and you probably wrote that famous “Hello there” message. Good! That’s the way it should be with small businesses, just jump right into water and never over analyze. As they say, paralysis by analysis.

It is now time to tune up a bit. We are going to go to your blog and inside there into the settings. Settings have several sub topics as follows: basic, publishing, formatting, comments, archiving, site feed, email and members. We get into them one by one, but because of the length of this post, I have decided to divide the topics to separate posts. In this post, I will deal with the basic settings.


BASIC
Title says it all this is what others will call your blog. Depending on the template that you chose, title could have different sizes and colors. What’s the name of your blog? I will insert an important tip here, you can go over it, if you feel time pressed, but I think it is a relevant advice, so give it a try.


IMPORTANT TIP - title and description
This tip is rather lengthy, but that’s the way I write to make my points – long and winding. Remember what I said about the importance of the sub domain and domain names for a company big or small? Same thing applies here. Search engines and directories systematically use titles and descriptions to organize and present information. Now, do you remember that sheep farm up there on the highlands of Scotland – was it called MacLeod?

If you would type MacLeod to a search engine, I bet you would get all sorts of genealogy, family, clan and personal pages to your screen and I tell you – there would be lot of results, probably over million. It is hard for a sheep farm to get noticed from the crowd of a million, especially as the searchers would be looking for something more name focused, instead of a sheep farm. It would be only few people, who take this approach and they already know your business, because they know you by name.

Internet is essentially a place for you to be found by new customers and inform the old ones because of the information search and communicative nature of the Internet. Luckily business blogs can support both, so you have a winner here. Oh, one more thing, take a note that there really are no or very few sheep farms in the search results for the name MacLeod.

Let’s take a different approach. We were after a sheep farm, so let’s search for that. Looks like there are even more results, almost three million, but at least now we are on the right track, because all of the results have something to do with sheep farms.

Next natural step is to narrow down the location as I don’t want to fly all the way down under to New Zealand for mutton, I add Scotland to the search. Ok, now we are talking or finding... At the time of my search, Google informs me that there are about 383000 results for “sheep farm Scotland”, so we are slowly approaching our target.

However, Scotland is mighty large area so I add even further local information with the word Skye, which is an island and I also add my desire (at the time of writing this, it is Eastern, so lamb and mutton comes to my mind, I apologize if there are vegetarians reading this), now let’s see the results. About 400 results, now this is the kind of number that feels bit more manageable. At this point I would probably scan the results a bit to see if I can find the jackpot right away. If not I would try to refine or tune the search even further.

Now, what does this have to do with your title and description? Well, you have to make sure that they include some of this crucial search information not just a name. John Smith, who? Get my point? If you are an entrepreneur e.g. hairdresser located in downtown Miami, Florida and specializing in pointy anime hairstyles, then you just have to tell that to the Internet – this is how people are going to find you. Phew, lot of writing makes lot of reading I sure hope that you are enjoying your coffee ;)


Description is the place where you give the basic information about your blog and as it probably is about small business then this is a place to describe your business.


Add your Blog to our listings? It is a good idea to list and choose yes. This way you get some extra exposure. If you want privacy, choose no, but if your blog is business related there is hardly any reason to hide.


Show Quick Edition on your Blog? Just say yes, this gives you faster access into editing.


Show Email Post links? Yes again, some readers might want to use this to send your info to their friends by email. There is a small chance that this gives you bit bigger exposure.


Show Compose Mode for all your blogs? This is definite yes as it makes the post writing more intuitive.


After you have done all the changes, just click the save settings button. When the saving is done, you have the option to republish the blog to see the changes. It is good to learn a habit to republish after every change, so that all your posts have the same features.

How to create a blog?

INTRODUCTION
Today we better go through the account creation process at Blogger. I said that it is easy and it is, but preliminary instructions could help some people. So there we go, to the Blogger.


ACCOUNT CREATION
First thing to do is to click that big red arrow right there in the middle of the screen. You will be transferred to a screen that asks you some information for setting up your blog. Every item has good description in the end, and there shouldn’t be any problems, just remember the words that you choose. In case you would like to change your account information, perhaps different name to be displayed, there are no limitations for that. Maybe you feel bit shy and want to start with alias and later on bring more personality to the game – no problem, you can do it just the way you like it.


NAME YOUR BLOG
Simply choose a suitable name for your blog, and then one line lower, choose an associated subdomain name. Once again, you can change these later, if you don’t get it right the first time. I don’t know how about you, but I always have troubles of coming up with good names. I go on and on about it, should it be this or that. I give you an advice that I myself should follow more often – choose the name that comes to your mind first and don’t start analyzing it. It could be wrong but somehow we intuitively know the correct answer if we are put in the spotlight. Remember, if it didn’t go right, you can always change it later. Now we have a name, are you ready to click “continue”? Oh wait, before you click “continue”, I will give you an important tip that you can use in naming your business blog.


IMPORTANT TIP
Search engines consider domain names very highly and if your blog is about sheep farming business it is generally a good idea to include sheep or farming (better to have both) into the domain name. It is the same game with subdomains, although they are not as important as domains, you still should take this point under consideration. Yes, I know that it would sound nicer to just have MacLeod, but MacLeod sheep farm will shoot you higher in the search engines, because engines know that mostly people search general information about sheep farming not about MacLeod sheep farm. Now, please click continue and we move on.


CHOOSE A TEMPLATE
Templates come in remarkably many shapes. Did I ever mention that if you don’t like the one you choose, you could change it later? In the initial list of choices, you have a lot to choose from, but if you later want to have a different template, you have even more choices and you can also check what Internet offers. In Internet, quite a few people are offering free templates to use in Blogger. Did you see anything you like? Great! Just click that small dot on the template you like and move to the bottom of the screen, continue button is waiting. After clicking, your blog is being created and then you have the option to start posting right away.


FAST SERVICE
As you see from the above description, it is not only very easy but also very speedy operation to have your own blog up and running. These are both wonderful benefits from business point of view, you have total control over your Internet operation and there will be no fees from the setting up or running the service. It is free, as long as you put some of your time on it and write few lines every now and then.

Next time we look at the account settings and features more closely. Now, feel free to write that liberating “Hello world” post. Have a great day!

More reasons to choose Blogger

I started thinking that maybe in the previous post, I was asking you to make a bit too long leap of faith, as I asked you to go with Blogger. I decided to further reason my case and to show that it is more that just a personal preference. Here are the reasons why I think that a person, who is rather inexperienced in building websites, should start with Blogger.

1. Intuitive user interface. Service will be up and running in no time, all you need to do is to make some simple choices in a step-by-step process. Most important decisions that you have to make are the choice of your subdomain name and the choice of template for you blog.

2. Template choices are pretty ok. Results are most of the time much better than even with a bought web design service. Maintaining is also very easy, simply three basic choices to maintain the comments – post, edit and delete. Very down to earth approach. If you do not get it right first time, there are plenty of tries here, you can have many subdomains and if you grow tired to a template, well, you can always change it and still keep the posts that you have written.

3. Templates are also modifiable so as your skills improve, you can go and tune things to your liking. Net is also full of free templates, especially designed for Blogger so you will have choices, lots of them.

4. Together with Blogspot and Hello services, you have almost limitless storage for your articles and pictures and both of these services are free. Is there a better way to learn the ropes than using intuitive environment that comes without any costs? This is a combination that gives a great return for the time that you invest into taking your small business online.

5. If you have your own domain and hosting that will not cause any problems. You can use Blogger as a content management system and use your hosting and domain to gain extra functional benefits, like store video and appear cooler because of your own domain.

6. Google stands behind this grand operation so we can pretty surely say that free operation will remain unchanged. I doubt that we will have any annoying ads, because Google already allows us to attach AdSense into our blogs so we have the commercials indirectly and we get our cut. This is a pretty good deal.

7. One thing that you should notice is that most small businesses pay to be advertised in the Internet. With your own blog and combined AdSense service, you will get lot of publicity in the net but also will be paid for being there. Great stuff, I like being paid for doing my advertisement campaigns, what about you? There is one but, you might end up serving advertises for you competitor, but not to worry we have our ways around that.

8. Because Google backs up this service, we can also be ensured that there will be steady flow of small upgrades, which keep the service competitive. No need to go chasing the latest bells and whistles, they will find their way to Blogger soon enough. Instead of chasing waves, you should pay attention on using your blog to promote your small business.

Only eight benefits!? In the next post I will finally get more practical with this and show how the account creation is really an easy as eating pie. Anyway, now it is time for me to visit a scale and... What?

Small business marketing course begins

There are many blogging services like MSN Spaces, AOL Journals, Blogger, LiveJournal and software like WordPress and Movable Type. Out of all these choices, I have chosen to use Blogger.

Blogger is my favourite service because it has such a simple user interface and is easy to operate. I believe that just about anyone can use it to publish his or her small business information and gain visibility on net with practically no costs.

If you want to follow my lessons on how to use blogs as an Internet marketing tool for small business you will make it considerably easier for yourselves to follow the lessons. Later on, I might include other services, but for now I am sticking with this one and only.

Before we go forward, I recommend you to go and register as a Blogger user so that you can follow everything shown here in practise. It will speed up the learning process and at the same time you have built yourself an operational website that will market your small business 24/7.

Now some snippets from the Blogger Terms of Service for those of you, who are in a hurry to set up their information site for business and have no time to read lengthy user agreements. However, if you are serious about using this service to take your small business online, you should read it all through, just to be on the safe side. Ok, let’s get on with it:

Article 2. "Some of these services will be free of charge, others may cost money or have other requirements."

Remember that future is never certain it might be that some day this free service will turn into paid service.

Article 4. "Pyra reserves the right to modify or discontinue the Service with or without notice to Member."

Always keep an eye on the modifications of service and reflect how it will change your situation.

Article 6a. "Member will retain copyright ownership and all related rights for information he or she publishes"

For the moment, all copyrighted content that you own and is published by using Blogger, will remain yours. This is essentially good news for the infopreneur.

Article 8. "MEMBER EXPRESSLY AGREES THAT USE OF THE SERVICE IS AT MEMBER'S SOLE RISK. THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED ON AN "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE" BASIS."

Easy there, no need to shout. We do understand that in the case of service failure, our information might not be available or our information could be gone. Always have a backup of the information you have published. They take no responsibility of any damages or losses.

Article 10. "Member agrees not to resell the Service, without the express consent of Pyra. (Note: Setting up Blogger blogs for clients to update their web pages and charging for your time is fine.)"

This is rather self-explanatory. We can bill customer for our work in setting up their blogging service, but we cannot include Blogger service into our billing.

Rest of the articles say that we have to behave ourselves and respect the rights of other people. If you just write about your business and use material e.g. pictures that you have taken, there should be no problems.

But wait, that is not all. Blogger uses Blogspot to store the information and if you do not have your own hosting service, you have to pay attention to Blogspot terms of service too.

Principally this is the same deal as with Blogger. Play nice and do not harm anyone with your opinions or actions, stay legal etc. They reserve the right to remove anything that you have posted, if it does not meet the legality requirements.

Well, that’s it. You should be able to start an account at Blogger without any problems. I will leave the registering as your homework, next time we will get busy and go on to building those small business marketing blogs that will give you an edge over your competition. It just has to wait until the next time.

Good day everyone.

I tuned the website settings

Now the site functions as I want monthly archives and no time on posts, just the day. I always get bit nervous when I see that somebody answered my mail in less than 5 minutes that kind of forces me to reply back and there we go again replies, replies, replies...

If you have followed my other sites, you might have noticed that I use very few links. That is because I mostly have been writing about news and news get old and because I don't want to take any extra website updating responsibilities, well, I shun the links.

However, some sites, like the one that I am building about log homes has massive amount of links, why? It is because I am linking to more or less stable resources that will be there after a year or two, this ensures that I have to do as little link management as possible. This is almost obligatory while working outside traditional websites, where we are allowed to place almost anything imaginable to automate the site functions. Not so while using web logging services, here our hands are tied and we have only limited access to the engine room. Therefore the need to keep things simple, and that sure is fine by me, after all I am bit of a log head.

Maybe this is enough as an introduction, and I can move to more defining articles that actually benefit your small business. Have a nice day everyone! (Indeed everyONE, I bet I am the sole person following this site at the moment of writing :)

Small business marketing blog hits the web

First post, braking the ice. This blog is about how small business companies can use blogs to do internet marketing by writing a blog. Purpose is to introduce a non-cost manner to gain web visibility. It will not be free as you have to use your time to write about your business.

I am planning to introduce some kind of guide that conveniently sums up everything that I will discuss here in the blog. However that we have to wait for quite some time, so meanwhile I better start writing about small business marketing with blogs and your job is to keep coming back and read the posts and if you want to make a BIG favor for me, you will also comment my posts and give feedback.