How to become a more disciplined business blogger. 7 Steps to Disciplined Business Blogging. Everybody and his cousin is blogging these days. All it takes is a template and a little time on your hands to have your thoughts broadcast on the Web. An effective business blog, on the other hand, take a commitment of time, resources and intellectual energy. Unless you are committed to producing a quality, well-written blog and are committed to updating that blog on a regular basis, don’t even bother starting. The worst business blogs are the ones where it is clear that the writer is winging it, just writing whatever comes to mind. A business must approach its blog in the same way it would approach any other marketing or branding campaign: with planning, staffing, execution and monitoring.
By following these seven steps, your small business can take the first steps towards a highly successful business blog: 1. Don’t blog because everybody else is doing it. 2. While this may sound crass, you are not blogging for your health. 3. 4. Here’s a template to get you started. 5. 6. 7. HOW TO: Get Started With Photo Blogging. The term "photo blog" has almost become redundant. Between the popularity of microblogging, and the fact that smartphones are capable of producing high-quality images, our digital communication has become increasingly photo-centric. We consume so much content in our digital lives, it seems we’ve developed a need for it to be presented in the simplest, most efficient way possible. Enter: the photo blog. If Flickr gave us the photo-sharing bug, then services like Tumblr, yFrog, Instagram and even Foodspotting are making it standard practice.
So how can you get in on the action? Here's how to get started. 1. Determine if you are the creator, curator or ringleader? If your motivation is simply to showcase your own photographs, then social functionality is probably low on the list while the ability to control use of your images is high. Let’s look at the top three free web-based, free platforms: Blogger: Think: basic. 2. Ask yourself what you want your viewers’ experience to be. 3. Sea Of Shoes. How To: Set Your Blogging Team Up For Success | oneforty. Elevate Your Value. How to properly combine fonts (a crash course in typography) Effectively combining typefaces requires some thought. Designers need to keep a few principles in mind—including contrast and mood. Take some quick notes with the tips below: More visual lessons at Noupe.
More on typography. How to Make Money and Not Be Ashamed - Susannah Breslin - Pink Slipped. Roots starter gets you developing WordPress themes rapidly - TNW Design & Dev. - Blogger stars have a VYou channel! Are you on it? Google’s Blogger Just Got Cool - TNW Google. Google’s Blogger platform hasn’t had any big releases for a long time now and has almost gotten lost in the race with the likes of Squarespace, Virb and Tumblr. Hoping to catch up, Google has just released previews of five new dynamic templates that will be available publicly to use and customize. Google says these new templates make use of the latest web technologies like AJAX, HTML5 and CSS3 to offer the wholesome goodness that they do.
Some remarkable features of these themes include: Infinite Scrolling: Much like what’s available in the Tumblr Dashboard.New Layouts: Different views for different types of blogs.Speed: Images load only when you view them, not automatically.Interactivity: New ways to experience and engage with the blog content. These new templates can be tried out on your own public blogs simply by adding /view to the URL.
You can preview these new templates here: Flipcard | Mosaic | Sidebar | Snapshot | Timeslide. Here’s a video from Google to whet your appetite: Secret Ingredients to Blog Subscriber Growth: Persistence & Promotion. We all know that starting a blog can feel daunting. Most of us aren’t professional writers or communications majors and the combined effort of brainstorming great topics and delivering them in an engaging way can feel pretty overwhelming. Worse yet, starting a blog from zero subscribers can mean a slow onramp and potentially losing the motivation to keep blogging.
That seems so depressing, why would anyone even bother starting a blog? Enough with the downers. The chart above is proof that bloggers shouldn’t lose faith – in fact they should have a little patience and be persistent in their blogging effort. Patience wasn’t the only tactic Nancy applied at PrimePay to increase blog readership. Create Remarkable Content with Cross Departmental Bloggers Promote the Blog with Small but Consistent Messages In the early days of the PrimePay blog it didn’t make sense to do large scale promotion.
To date, PrimePay’s persistence and simple but powerful promotional tactics have paid off. How to grow and maintain a brilliant blog. I always get a lot of questions about business blogging and how people can improve their own blogs or just get started. There are 100s of posts out there on the topic but I wanted to look at things from a slightly higher level today and see what you can do to create a really remarkable blog. None of these tips are going to pay off overnight and none will turn your blog into a massive hit without hard work but they do work and they are important if you are really serious about this. Rather than thinking everything on this list is going to deliver results by the end of the month look at the items on here and try to implement them over the course of a full year to see the full effect.
Write Your Posts On A Train Or Plane You obviously can’t jump on a plane or train every time you need to write a blog post but all the great posts I write are when I am offline and only have a text editor in front of me. Don’t Compete With News Sites Sell Your Blog Like A Book Read Everything You Can Find. How to Make Your Blog Big on StumbleUpon: Your Content.
On Monday we talked about how to increase your blog’s visibility on StumbleUpon by engaging with other Stumblers. Today I’ll talk about what you can do with your own material to set yourself up for success: 1. Make the gist of any page obvious, and enable easy exploration of your site. Stumblers are eager to discover new content and information, and they’ll often engage deeply with a site they’ve stumbled upon if it’s clear from the landing page that further exploration will be rewarded. So think of any page on your site on which a Stumbler arrives as a foyer, beckoning your visitor to explore further. Visuals and concise writing coupled with links to similar content elsewhere on your site invite this deeper exploration. Ted.com pulls visitors into content at first glance and then makes it easy to discover other talks on the site. Also, specific is better. 2. 3. 4.
How To Install WordPress – A Step By Step Video. I’ve decided to add to my step by step guide on how to install WordPress with a step by step video. Why? Because many people don’t like reading 1000 word long guides and would rather just sit in a nice comfy chair and watch a video on how it’s done. The video shows the steps I go through when someone orders my free WordPress installation service. After watching the video, I feel that you should be able to install WordPress all by yourself. However, if you’re still feeling a little intimidated by process, feel free to order my free WordPress installation service and I’ll do it for you. Now would actually be a great time to use my service and start your WordPress blog since HostGator is having a 20% off sale. You can get a hosting plan for as low as $3.95 a month right now.
Get Your Blog for 1 Cent – Use Coupon Code JohnChowRocks Did you enjoy this post? Stay up to date with all of John Chow’s tips for making money online and blog posts by subscribing via email. Learn WordPress.com. Qawker: an open source Gawker theme clone for WordPress. Press Tags: An ingenious plugin to discover trending topics among WordPress blogs.
15 February '11, 09:10am Follow If you’re a new blog, you’re going to start with a small network of readers and limited topics. Help boost traffic to your blog by bringing in relevant content using PressTags, a network for WordPress bloggers designed to help you discover relevant posts written by other WordPress bloggers. It works similarly to Twitter’s trending topics such that the most relevant topics of different WordPress blogs are indexed. Do a quick search and you’ll see some of the most popular blog entries about the topic and a recent activities graph that shows how popular the topic is over time.
It also gives a list of related topics to help you discover categories that may be relevant to you. If you download the plugin, it adds a news feed on your WordPress dashboard that automatically figures out the topics you usually blog about. The community of PressTags not only widens your potential audience, but also serves as a tool to discover relevant topics to write about. 7 Business Blogging Myths, Debunked. Every company should have a business blog, but many brands and businesses have certain stereotypes about blogging. It can be an intimidating step to take because even though blogging has moved into the mainstream in recent years, it’s surprising how little people know about the mechanics of blogging.
It is now a common term in most board rooms and with marketing teams but there is still a huge amount of ignorance out there as to the benefits of blogging for business and the mechanics of how it works. I hear the same questions over and over again so here are some of the most popular misconceptions around business blogging. 1. Isn’t it just other bloggers who read blogs? There is no doubt that other bloggers read blogs because that is what they are passionate about and it’s a tight knit community but a huge amount of people read blogs who have never written a word online in their lives. 2. 3. It depends. 4. Depends what sort of blog you write. 5. Not true. 6. 7. How to go from lone blogger to news organization: VentureBeat. 27 January '11, 04:19am Follow An ex-correspondent for the Wall Street Journal Matt Marshall is now the founder of VentureBeat -A digital publication to provide news about innovation for forward-thinking executives.
He has been in Silicon Valley for ten years and has some interesting perspective on the technology industry’s evolution from first dot com crash to the fast growing ecosystem it is today. I asked about how he set up VentureBeat and his plans for the future. More on Matt: Matt also covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News until he left in September 2006 to launch VentureBeat as an independent company. In 2008, the New York Times called VentureBeat one of the “best blogs on the Web,” and now the NYT runs VentureBeat’s articles on its web site. Matt, who currently serves as Editor-in-Chief, covered the venture capital beat for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006.
Keywords - How to Choose Good Keywords for Your Site. Keywords - Learn Where and How to Put Keywords. Free WordPress Installation Service – Start Your Blog Today. One of the most common complaint (or excuse) I hear from potential new bloggers is they don’t know how to install WordPress. Terms like FTP and CPanel are like a foreign language and setting up a database might as well be setting up the space shuttle for a launch. Because of the technology barrier, many would be bloggers never start their blogs. If you’re in this situation, then you’ll be happy to know about my new free WordPress installation service. It’s really simple. I will install and set up a WordPress blog for you at no cost to you.
Not only that, I will also install for free the following plugins to get your blog started on the right foot: All In One SEO Google SitemapW3 Total CacheShow Top CommentatorsWordPress.com StatsAkismet After The Deadline All In One SEO is the ultimate SEO plugin for WordPress and will help your blog rank higher with the search engines. What’s The Catch? There is no catch. Click Here To Order Your New WordPress Blog Get 25% Off Any Web Hosting Plan. About - Captain Squid. Anatomy of a WordPress Theme - The Social Media Guide. How to make money using the Internet. Make money: not by building an internet company, but by using the net as a tool to create value and get paid. Use the internet as a tool, not as an end. Do it when you are part of a big organization or do it as a soloist. The dramatic leverage of the net more than overcomes the downs of the current economy.
The essence is this: connect. Connect the disconnected to each other and you create value. Connect advertisers to people who want to be advertised to. Some examples? Connect advertisers to people who want to be advertised to.Dani Levy did this with Daily Candy, a company she recently sold for more than a hundred million dollars. Connect job hunters with jobs.My friend Tara has made hundreds of thousands of dollars (in good years) working as an executive recruiter. Connect information seekers with information.At a large scale, this is what Bloomberg did to make his fortune. On a micro level, there are now people making thousands of dollars a month running their pages on Squidoo. Learn WordPress.com.