Posts Tagged ‘blog’

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Blogging for a Small Business

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

Blogs are easy way to communicate with the customers, and employees. From past few years, blogs are continuing as one of the effective channels of communication when compared to other advertising channels. Blogs for business can help to strengthen relationships with targeted audiences. A blog can help in as many ways, from a business perceptive.

Reasons why a small business needs blogging
Small businesses need to be more effective in building a potential and loyal customer base when compared to large businesses. Blogs helps in increasing the consumer base.
• Building customer relationships: Blogs are very helpful to increase the brand loyalty in customers by engaging with them through blogging on their favorite topics. Regularly updated blogs can help businesses in making readers to visit the website on regular basis. This may steadily enhance the business opportunities of the organization. Blogs became easy and effective medium to make the customers to join in discussions, providing tips, insights, etc., about the products and services of many businesses.
• Blogs at workplace: Employees can write their opinions, views, and recommendations for any developments in the business. Blogs helps small businesses for effective cross-functional communication with employees. Companies can create internal blogs within organizations where project members and employees update project information along with reports without having to waste time for interaction and responses for minor updates.
• For brand awareness: Small businesses can easily update their recent achievements in products and services in blogs and can create awareness to the customers about them. With regular reading of blogs, customers can know the latest developments in the business. Blogs help small businesses to create brand awareness for the products or services they offer.
• Better communication: Blogging for small businesses facilitate to increase the integrity in the organization with the easy communication process between the employees and the management. Blogs are also created to attract the readers of targeted markets. Companies update their respective blogs frequently with opinions and reviews of customers along with their new achievements in their products and services, and make them visible to almost everyone online.

Blogging enables the small businesses to stay in business, to connect with its customers, clients. This can indirectly help to increase their sales. Blogging can make your customers relate better to company on a personal level. Blogging is a great way to set your company apart from the group of small, and home based businesses through Internet.

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Posted in Blogging, Site Promotion, social networking, Website Design, Website Development | No Comments »

How to Start a Blog Using WordPress

Monday, April 20th, 2009

Blogging is all about writing content and building a community of readers which will bring more traffic to your web site, hone your writing skills, and so much more.

Starting a blog is a great way to create a web presence. Blogging is a great way to communicate, build credibility and expertise, bring more traffic to your web site, hone your writing skills, and so much more. Following is a step by step process for setting up a Word press blog.

Firstly, go to wordpress.com and create a free account. You will be asked to choose a name for your blog. It will look like this: yourname.wordpress.com.

Next, log in to your account at wordpress.com. At the dashboard and you can start to create your first post. Click on the New Post button in the grey bar that runs across the top or click on Add New under the Posts category on the left hand bar.
After you have finish writing your article you will want to do a few other things before you post. First, you will want to add tags for your post. A tag is just a way to organize and search for content on your site as your content grows. You can create whatever tags you want for each post.
After you add tags, you will also want to add a category. A category is more formal than a tag. Choose category title carefully with a mind for the future. After you add tags and categories, you can go ahead and publish your post. Then click on Publish and you will be able to see your article officially posted on your blog.

To change your blog’s design, go back to your WordPress dashboard. When you are back in the dashboard, click on Appearance in the left hand column. Then click on Themes. Look through the theme thumbnails and pick one that you like then click on Activate this Theme at the top right corner of that preview.

Lastly, to add a new widget, choose a sidebar. Then click add next the widget that you want. Try adding a Text widget. Once you add it, you need to edit it to say what you want it to say. To do this, go back over to the Current Widget list. Since you added it, it should appear there. Click edit on the blue bar that says Text. Enter your text into the text box and click done. The text widget will appear in the sidebar.
You can get further customizations for your WordPress blog by visiting WordPress.org.

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3 Things You Must Know About Cheap Blog Hosting

Sunday, March 8th, 2009

People often say that you get what you pay for, but is it true about cheap blog hosting? Not all hosts are created equal, so you need to be able to decide if the deal on offer is a good one or not. Here are three things you MUST know about cheap blog hosting.

1. Will I Have Enough Resources To Host My Blog?

A blog is usually run by scripts, and those scripts will take up disk space. Using WordPress for example (which is perhaps the best overall choice for a blogging platform), starts at around 5Mb. Once you add a few plug ins to make the blog do what you want, then you are probably looking at another 5mb of disk space.

If you plan to run video on blog as well, then you could be looking at higher bandwidth as well, so in short, you need a reasonable amount of resources just to get started. This pretty much eliminates the free hosts, but most good hosts would cover you easily.

2. Will I have Enough Features To Host My Blog?

Again because blogs are usually scripts, your host needs to allow you to execute scripts from your blog. This is not as scary as it sounds because the top blogging platforms such as WordPress can be automatically installed using Cpanel and something called Fantastico, which makes installation child’s play. As long as Fantastico is available and you are able to run PHP scripts, then you have the features to host your blog.

3. Will I Get Help If I Run Into Trouble When I Host My Blog?

Here is a biggy. Will your host help you if you get into trouble? Despite how much easier these things have been made, many people still come unstuck at some stage of the process. What you need is a web host who will try and go that extra mile for you when things get tough. Not everything is straight forward when you are web hosting, and a good web host understands that and goes of their way to help you. If the support from your cheap blog hosting is poor, then it is too cheap, and you should be looking elsewhere.

I have found that some web hosts will go that extra mile for you and will help you with things like third party scripts for example. Not all will do this of course, and nor should you expect it. However when you do receive this kind of help, it does make that particular host stand out from the crowd.

I have also found that some web hosts pay lip service to support. They answer questions quickly, but usually with more question, using time that would have been better spent answering your query. If your host’s support leads you round in circles, then perhaps it is time to look elsewhere for a cheap web host.

So there we have it. If you cover these three bases with your web host, then you can truly say that you have found cheap blog hosting that is good value for money. Good luck with your blogging!

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Posted in Blogging, Hosting, Website Development | 3 Comments »

How To Make My Website Come Up First In Google

Sunday, March 8th, 2009

Contrary to common beliefs having a website that comes up first in Google is not hard at all, you just need to follow few simple steps in optimizing your website and your relatively new website will appear in the top search results .

This article will give you tips that will help your website’s pages come up first in Google’s results.

Tips that will make your website come up first

* Internal linking is very important: External links are very important but I have lots of pages that show on the top of the results in Google without having any external links pointing to them and without having any page rank . The other very important tip is to let the internal link’s anchor text contain the same keywords your original article has. For example when linking to your article that is called “How to become rich fast” from another page don’t give the link the title “making money” or “Getting rich” but instead call it “How to become rich fast”

* Write articles that match popular search keywords: Your article’s title , keywords and header tags should match popular search keywords. For example if people always search for the keywords “How to become rich fast” then your article should be optimized for this key phrase. For example your article’s title and URL path should not be “how to make money” or “how to earn thousands of dollars” but instead it should be “How to become rich fat”. For more information see my articles how to optimize my pages for search engines and Increasing search engine hits

* Does time really matter?: Older pages are more respected by search engines but I usually see my new websites showing up in the top results in Google three weeks after the creation date. In short, time doesn’t matter, if anyone told you anything other than this know that he doesn’t have enough experience.

* Your main page should be stuffed with keywords that are related to your articles: Pretty self explanatory, taking the last example into consideration the main page should contain the keywords “Become rich” and “Fast”. Of course its much better to have the whole key phrase in the main page if possible.

* Does frequent updates really matter?: yes, updating your website daily is a must. Google gives higher importance to websites that are updated daily. You can take one or two days off but try to update your website during the rest of the days.

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How To Add RSS Feed Content To Your Blog

Monday, March 2nd, 2009

For those of you who don’t know, RSS today stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” It’s a type of web feed that’s used to publish updates.

The basics of RSS date back 14 years ago – and the concept didn’t even barely catch on until 1999 or so when Netscape created their “RDF Site Summary” (RSS 0.9) – which lasted only four months until they updated and tweaked it into a: “Rich Site Summary.” (RSS 0.91) In a bit of oddness, one year later an independent and non-commercial working group updated RSS again, calling it… “RDF Site Summary” (RSS 1.0) The world moved on, and time flowed. Two whole years later a breakthrough came and the RSS that we know today–”Really Simple Syndication” (RSS 2.0) was born – and it’s the RSS the web 2.0-savvy generation knows and loves.

You can start the process of adding RSS feeds to your blog by looking for something called an RSS feed aggregator or reader. Adding RSS feeds to your blog is pretty simple, even for those unfamiliar with XML. The feed aggregator will collect RSS feeds collectrf and create a code that you can use to display these feeds on your blog. When these feeds are updated, your blog feed willself-update to fit the latest site or blog update.

The easiest way to get started is by trying out a trial version of an RSS feed reader or using a free version. Once you have your feed reader installed, you will want to begin looking for related feeds for when you begin adding RSS feeds to your blog. Try Yahoo News, Google News, and blog search engines to find topics that match your audience’s interests. RSS feeds can add fresh content successfully to any type of blog – you can add freelance projects, jobs, industry-related news, advice columns, horoscopes, press releases, and other up-to-the-minute content without doing any researching at all. The only researching you’ll need to do is find the websites that have an RSS newsfeed. How can you find out if the content is feed-ready? You need to look for the RSS newsfeed symbol, or find the link that says “syndicate this”.

When you select a given feed, choose for the website to send you to a page with XML code. Copy-and-paste the URL of this page into your aggregator. Your aggregator will then create a small piece of code that you can paste into your blog. Your blog will now always contain a new set of summaries and links will be generated by the RSS feed you added.

Adding content to your blog doesn’t have to be complicated, as you can see. You just need a little Web 2.0 know-how, some search skills, and a little help from some online friends. Don’t be afraid to get creative with your blog and choose some interesting topics that really stand out – blogs are meant to be unique. And remember, blogging is a publication that is always a work in progress – and the more focused it is, the more you cake it shine.

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Some Steps to Increase Your Website Traffic With Rss Feeds

Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

Follow along and learn the simple secrets to increase website traffic with a few clicks of your mouse. RSS stands for “really simple syndication” and it serves as a tool to keep visitors updated to a websites changes without the person having to go back to the website.

Generating Your RSS Feed

If you have a wordpress blog (the most common blogging platform) then you already have an RSS feed built in to your blog. You can find your feed at your domain.

If you have another type of blog check the user guide of your blogging platform to find out where your RSS feed is located or how to generate one. For more details visit to www.inside-the-minds-of-winner.com .Unfortunately most internet marketers don’t know the first thing about using their RSS feed to increase website traffic. There are some very simple steps that you can take to dynamically increase your traffic absolutely free with your RSS feed.

The first thing that you should consider doing is setting up a Feedburner account so that they can manage your feed. Feedburner is a free service that gives some basic traffic stats, keeps track of how many people have subscribed to your RSS feed and best of all makes it really easy for visitors to subscribe to your feed.

After you have setup Feedburner to manage your feed they will give you a URL for your feed. Take that URL and put it on every page of your blog so that anytime someone clicks on the link they will have the option to subscribe to your feed.

Two More Steps and You’re Done

Once your feed is setup and the URL is on every page of your blog the only thing left to do is to submit your feed to some feed directories. For more information logon to www.ultimate-internet-marketing-tricks.com .A feed directory is a site that lists several feeds from all over the web on one website. Feed directories can not only bring in tons of new visitors to your website but they also provide good backlinks to your website. Backlinks are needed for any website to rank well in the search engines.

There are two feed directories that stand head and shoulders above the rest in the online world. Often time’s just submitting links from these two directories can rocket your site to the top of the engines which will obviously help you to increase website traffic.

The first of these two is Feedage. Feedage requires you to setup a free account but once you do you can submit as many feeds to them as you want. It’s very simple and only takes a few minutes to setup a free account and submit your feed.

The second directory is Feedagg and they don’t even require you to setup an account. You simply click on the “add feed” link and input your information. It’s really that easy.

That’s all there is to making the most of your RSS feeds to bring in extra free website traffic to your website. Follow the simple steps laid out and watch your traffic numbers steadily increase.

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