Monthly Archives: January 2005

How Often Should You Blog?

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A recent discussion asked how often should a marketer blog – unsurprisingly, no one thought daily writing was necessary.

Few want to work on business writing for a blog, and writing every day is a chore, especially if there isn’t an immediate financial reward.

But is every couple of days enough?

One argument against frequent postings is that few people have the time to read a daily blog.

The answer is simple – we make time. People can find time for reading the newspaper, trade journals, favorite novelists and so on – daily, on weekends, and whenever they have a free moment.

The key is interest. If the material is attention-grabbing, they you will grab – get ready for it – attention.

And if you’re not posting often, you’re losing the benefits of the blog – a chance to get search engine postings, rankings, and another chance to grab eyeballs with your site.

So do it as often as possible. Daily may not be reasonable or possible, but consistency works wonders.

FreeWordZ.com – the Site for (Oddly Enough) ‘Free Words’

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Read any online business book, and you’re likely to hear the same thing: the money is in the list.

Web browsing is very isolated – a person comes, reads, and goes – and that may be the last you see of him or her.

But with an email list, you have a chance to build a relationship, and possibly a few sales.

I’ve talked about this for years (getting visitors back is the cornerstone of my Promo-Cal product), and to an extent a blog tries to do this as well – but you should always include an email list in the mix.

However, newsletter publishers and blog writers have a similar problem – what to write about?

With that in mind, I created FreeWordZ.com, a site with free words, or articles, for newsletters.

You can use it in two ways:

  • If you need content for your newsletter, drop by and do a search on a topic. These articles have been made freely available for newsletter republishing.
  • If you need a ‘jump-start’ on what to write, do a quick search of articles, and use them as a springboard for your own ideas.

With thousands of articles, it should be easy to find something interesting to liven up your newsletter, and save you the time and effort of writing your own.

As a added benefit, you can get the article emailed to you, ready to enter into your newsletter (which is MY way of building an email list!)

So drop into FreeWordZ.com, and save yourself some time.

How Can You be a Blog Expert?

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I’ve appreciated many of the eBooks I’ve read on the subject, and I’ve gotten a great deal of knowledge from them.

One catch – very few blog regularly themselves.

Rule #1 – if you’re doing a book on how to blog, you MUST have one. Or two. And write in them regularly.

Why?

  • I see people starting and then stopping blogs all the time. What’s needed is information on continuing blogs – and that requires experience.
  • The blogger I was three months ago and today are two different people, with two different styles. How many people mention what you learn from blogging over a period of time?
  • Blogging is a fair amount of work initially, but it gets easier. That’s something worth mentioning – if more people went through with it.
  • Some issues only come up after time (like what not to write) – a blogger who has been around a while can point these out.

It’s over the long haul that people realize what blogs are all about. Like any production, it takes time.

In fact, it’s making me think about writing an eBook myself. If anyone has a distribution channel for it, let me know, and maybe you’ll see ‘Dave’s Guide to Blogs’ sometime soon.

Introductory Blog eBook – Free for a Limited Time Only

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I’ve mentioned Debbie Weil’s site in the past – she offers products for companies interested in blogging.

Well, she’s produced a free resource that’s worth downloading. Her PDF (Acrobat format) eBook ‘Beginner’s Guide to Business Blogging’ is available gratis for the next two weeks.

It’s a great introduction to blogging (especially from a business perspective), and has plenty of links to provide additional information.

Don’t think – just go and get it. Now.

I’ve only two criticisms: in mentioning RSS readers, it doesn’t mention the Sage RSS plugin for Mozilla’s FireFox browser.

And the other: I wasn’t in the list of Best Business Blogs. But I expect that’s just an oversight that’ll be corrected in the next edition…

Why Create a Business Blog?

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I get this question a lot – what’s the benefits of having one?

Although there’s a number of reasons, let’s look at a single area – search engines. So how do you use blogs to help with search engines?

  • To be seen. I started BigBizBlog.com in late November of 2004. Not quite three months later, I’ve got more traffic here than some of my older sites, and creeping up on my main software site, Activebits.com (which has been up in various incarnations since 1996).
  • To get indexed. Within a week of writing, BigBizBlog.com was listed on Google. Same for the other sites I set up recently. In the past, I’ve been content with regular sites getting seen every month or two.
  • To get others indexed. As an experiment, I put up a brand new site (no references anywhere else) as a link on BigBizBlog.com – it was indexed by Google within 48 hours. Try that any other way!

Now this isn’t a scam, or a sneaky back-door technique – the fact is, search engines consider blogs to be relevant and ever-changing, and give priority to updating their contents. Try any ‘stunts’, and you could get banned, just like with any other search engine trick.

But if you work with them, providing quality content on your blog, and linking only to relevant items, everyone’s happy.

And you get indexed – and seen.

(over the past little while, I’ve been offering blog installations of WordPress on your server starting at $150US – if you’re interested, email me for a consultation by writing to dave at BigBizBlog.com – P.S. If this message has disappeared, so has the offer.)