Posts Tagged ‘Blogging’

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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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How to Succeed in blogging?

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

Blogging is a technology where bloggers unite and succeed. Thats what I think, I might be wrong but bloggers need to know one thing clear regarding blogs, that blogs are not only content sites they are also a good communication channels. This channel must be displayed in front of readers in order to get those readers. So the main activity for a blogger should be that he starts communicating with his fellow bloggers. If he didn’t start to communicate, this will lead him to no reader for his blog. Once a blogger starts having some readers for his blog, they will inturn generate more readers. Its completely a viral effect.

One activity that bloggers are mostly engaged in, is writing content. The content must be good. Otherwise no where the blog will be seen, if the blogger wants to get noticed. he should write quality content. Content is the essence of a blog, This thing must be remembered. If you don’t write a content that appeals to your readers, you would not be able to sustain those readers.In order to attract a lot of readers a bloggers must focus on writing some excellent content. This content can be of any type like an how to article, desciption or a list of Links , but it must appeal to the public.

Bloggers do forget about their niche. This must be remembered that in order to succeed you must first focus what’s your niche. The niche can be anything from Technology to lifestyle. But focusing the niche is really important because unless you focus on your niche, how could you label your blog. Bloggers mostly fail because they don’t focus on their niche, they write content about each and everything found on earth, thinking that it will bring more readers, but actually readers go for those blogs which contains a lot of content for a particular niche.

A blogger must also regularly Bookmark his articles on various bookmarking sites. This brings him in attention of a lot of readers which again bookmark the blog, thus having a viral effect. Please don’t Spam the bookmarking sites, otherwise your domain could be banned.

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Why Blogging is No Longer Optional If You Do Business Online

Monday, April 20th, 2009

by Christine Gallagher

I know, I know. I can hear some of you groaning now! Many of you already have a blog and understand its importance in gaining visibility for your business. But I know many others are still resistant to the idea. You believe it takes too much time and effort, you don’t think you are a great writer, you don’t know how to set one up, you don’t know what to write about….I understand all of the reasons that may be holding you back.

If you already have a traditional, “brochure” style website for your business that’s great. You should keep that as a place for prospective clients and customers to visit to find out more about you and what you offer. I use my blog as my main site, meaning I don’t have a separate, static website. That’s a personal choice. Many people choose to have both, with the blog being linked to from the main site.

If you don’t currently have a blog, there are several important reasons why you should consider it:

Visibility: If you are doing even just some of your business using the web then you obviously need to have an online presence. Having a blog that you post to regularly is a wonderful way to capture and keep the attention of your prospects. When they see that you are posting consistently updated content, they are more likely to return to your site.

Search Engine Optimization: This doesn’t mean you need to study up and implement a ton of SEO techniques yourself. But blogs by their very nature are dynamic, meaning the content is updated often. In Google’s eyes, this is a very good thing-it shows that their users are getting fresh information. A blog is a great way to get your business to rank well in the search engines.

Community Building: By allowing comments on your posts you are promoting conversation and encouraging feedback. It can even help you to perform “market research” and find out what it is your target market needs from you. This feedback can also be helpful for coming up with ideas for future posts.

Positions you as the Expert: Something interesting happens once you begin posting useful content regularly and attracting subscribers. You become seen as a thought leader in your niche. This leads to more opportunities, more relationships and more business. It’s a terrific way to communicate the value of what you have to offer to prospective clients and customers.

Personality Sharing: Blogging gives you a chance to be seen as a real person and not just a business. Be willing to express opinions and let your true self shine through. This will go a long way towards humanizing you in the eyes of your readers.

In my opinion, the best thing about blogging is how simple and quick it is to publish a post at the push of a button. It’s also wonderful to be able to track exactly how many people are coming to your blog and where they are coming from. Just install Google’s free Analytics tool and you can see detailed statistics on your visitors and traffic.

Just begin and get it going. Aim to post once a week. They don’t have to be long posts and they don’t have to be earth-shatteringly brilliant. As with anything, you’ll get better at writing the more you do it. Jot down any ideas that come to you for posts as you go about your day. I keep a file of topic ideas that I think of and I find this helpful to look at if I get stuck for what to write about.
Blogging should be something you carve out time for just as you would any other marketing activity. If you really feel you would have nothing to say to people who may want to hire or buy from you, then perhaps it is just not for you. But I encourage all small business owners who are doing business online to at least give it a try. You never know, there may be people out there just waiting to hear your voice.

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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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Best Blogging Platform – Which Blogging Platform Should You Use?

Monday, April 20th, 2009

Many bloggers and would be bloggers don’t use WordPress because they feel it is too difficult to set up and too expensive to operate. Both of these reasons are common misconceptions and totally untrue.
If you were to notice, some blogging publication platforms are more complex than the others. Although there are many blogging platforms such as WordPress (self-hosted version), Blogger, Bloglines, Text Pattern, Moveable Type, Serendipity, Life Type, and Flat Press.

Blog platforms such as WordPress and Blogger are versatile and easy to use. However, WordPress is far and away the best choice for setting up your blog because of its astonishing versatility, astounding functionality, and incredible revenue generating potential.
Here are some reasons why WordPress is the best blogging platform. Firstly, when you use other blogging platforms that are not self hosted your content does not really belong to you. This means that your blog can be pulled offline at any time and without any reason.

Secondly, these are add on programs that can easily add a massive array of functionality to your blog. Most widgets are free and very easy install. Some widgets can even automate your blog content which means you never have to write a word.

Lastly, you can actually install WordPress and set it up as a website rather than a blog. This is a very nice feature, especially if you know next to nothing about web design or HTML code. Depending on the themes you chose to use you can actually create a very nice looking and super easy to update website with just WordPress. If you want to install WordPress and use it as a website, log into your control panel and click on “Reading” under the Settings tab. Simple select “A Static Page” and your blog will become a website!

So in reality, WordPress is both very easy to setup and very inexpensive to own and operate if you choose the right host. If you are interested in blogging because you want to make money from your blog then a WordPress blog is a must and no self-respecting Internet Marketer will tell you any different.

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Adding Extra Sidebar to your WordPress Theme

Thursday, April 16th, 2009

While trying to add an extra sidebar to my blog, I found this fantastic article over at Blog oh Blog by Jai. All credit goes to them for the article, i just thought it was so great, I wanted to share it with everyone.

You can find the original article here.

You like a WordPress theme on the Internet but Oh!… What’s this?? The theme has only one sidebar! You need more than one and are on the verge of switching to some other theme with more sidebars. But wait!! Let me teach you how to add an extra sidebar or sidebars to your favorite theme. People who know PHP will find it easy to follow but even novices can easily do it using the code that I have provided in this tutorial. I am assuming that you already know HTML and a bit of CSS.

To begin the tutorial, extract your theme into a folder and open it to see all the files. If your theme has only one sidebar, then most probably you will NOT find a file called functions.php in your theme folder. In that case you will have to create this file yourself. Just open notepad or any other code editor to start a new file.

Put this code into that file :-

<?php

if ( function_exists(‘register_sidebars’) )

register_sidebars(2);

?>

Save the file as functions.php and put it in your theme folder. This piece of code actually tells WordPress to register two sidebars for you (See register_sidebars(2) in the code). If your theme has more than one sidebar, you will find the functions.php file already present in your theme folder. You just have to edit the number to your requirement and save the file. You can increase this number if you want more sidebars and if your theme’s layout can accommodate it. Now, when you go to your WordPress admin section and browse to the widgets under the menu item called presentation, you will see two sidebars listed there. You can drag your widget items into any of the sidebars.

Now comes the part where we actually build the sidebars. If your theme has only one sidebar, try to locate a file called sidebar.php in your theme folder. In this example, where we are trying to modify the theme for two sidebars, let’s rename sidebar.php to sidebar1.php and make a new blank file called sidebar2.php.

Put this code into sidebar2.php and save the file :-

<div>

<ul>

<?php if ( function_exists(‘dynamic_sidebar’) && dynamic_sidebar(2) ) : else : ?>

<?php endif; ?>

</ul>

</div>

So, we have the two sidebars ready but they have not been placed in the index.php file yet. Both these sidebars need to be called from the index.php file in order to include them in your theme. Just open the index.php file from your theme folder and locate the code that calls your sidebar file (sidebar.php earlier).

It should look something like :-

<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/sidebar.php’); ?>

Edit this code and change the words sidebar.php to sidebar1.php.

This takes care of the first sidebar. Now take a look at the index.php file carefully and find a suitable place to insert the second sidebar. This might involve modifying your layout or adding new divs.

Once you find a suitable place, place the following code there :-

<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/sidebar2.php’); ?>

Save the index.php file and now preview your theme. You will see all the widgets that you placed in both your sidebars appearing on your website. If you have not placed any widgets yet, you will not see any change. There might be alignment errors but you will have to fix them yourself. You can add more sidebars in a similar way to your WordPress theme. I hope this tutorial helps some of you.

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