For many website owners, running an online (and perhaps offline) business leaves little time to create their own blog content, at least on a daily basis. There are number of ways deal with this situation.
The first and most obvious is to only post to your blog two or three time per week. In today’s world, it can be quite acceptable However, if you are looking to leverage your blog for search engine traffic then the more content you have, the faster your search engine rankings may climb. It is not only the search engines; the more blog content you can provide the faster you can gain a reputation within your niche.
Other options include buying content. This can be done on a post by post basis, as a series of posts, or as full contract where the blog content is not only supplied; it is created and published on your behalf. They basically manage the blog on your behalf.
What many organizations don’t realize is that you can combine both. You can create your own blog content, say two or three times per week whilst using a bog content service to fill in the gaps. This may be a better alternative for many business owners as they can maintain their own contributions yet have the benefit of daily posting, for less money.
There are many blog content services that will happily negotiate posting timetables and relative costs. You just need to determine how much of your time you can afford to dedicate to creating content. Place a realistic figure on that time and then do a comparison with various content providers. You may be surprised at the low costs involved.
Social bookmarking and blogging have built a reputation for unreliability and high bounce rates. If you approach social bookmarking sensibly, this does not need to be the case. You can develop a flow of regular readers over a period of time.
Most bloggers forget the original theme behind social bookmarking - and that is the term social. For many bloggers, they sign on and try to accumulate as many ‘friends’ or contacts as possible. They then spend their time submitting their own content and sending it on to all their friends in the hope they will vote it up.
To be effective, you need to be a little more social. Rather than promoting your own content, you should be on the lookout for content that may interest those you have befriended. Over time you will gain a reputation for only promoting the best content.
Once you have developed the reputation for submitting quality content, slipping your own posts into the submission process will not be a problem, so long as it is quality and of benefit to all. There will be times when you won’t need to submit your own content. Because you are seen as someone who only submits quality content, those who visit your site are quite likely to submit for you if they think it is quality.
Social bookmarking is all about being social and interacting with others on the various sites. Sites such as Digg work very much on a reciprocal basis. If you Digg their quality content, they are likely to Digg yours. Be social and social bookmarking may work for you. Be selfish and the only visitors you get will be the high bounce rate type.
If you decide to run ad units as part of your blogging income, you need to determine where you are going to place them. If you are being paid by the placement then you should have an agreement as to where that ad unit is placed. If you are running affiliate or PPC ad units, then placement can have a huge effect on your results.
With pay-per-click (PPC) ad units such as Adwords, you will need to play around with the various types and placements of your ad units. The most popular is generally considered the 300×250 text/image ad unit placed within the body of a post. However, different blog layouts will require testing to see the best placement.
When testing ad unit placements, give each placement a reasonable time frame. Ten days is probably a minimum to test for effectiveness. Make sure you record the ad units placement and number of clicks and income received. After ten days, move the ad unit to another place and test again.
One mistake that many bloggers make it to decide on an ad unit and test it in three or four places. They then select the best out of the three or four and run with it. You nay be losing a lot of blogging income if you quit your test regime to early.
You should test in four or five different places on your page, and you should test several different ad unit types including the text only ad units.
If you want to capitalize on any possible blogging income, you will need to test, retest, and test again until you find the best ad unit and the best placement for that ad unit.
If you are an Adsense publisher then you will want to publish your ad units in the most effective places possible. You may also want to have control over when you publish those ads. For example, if you also undertake affiliate marketing and you write the occasional blurb on one of your affiliates, the last thing you should really do is include an Adsense ad unit.
If you install the Adsense plugin WordPress you can control when your ad units are inserted into your posts. To use the plugin, you need to setup an ad unit through your Adsense account. One the best for converting into clicks is the 300 x 250. You can play around various ad unit sizes until you find one that converts into clicks more frequently.
Once you have downloaded the plugin, you will need to unzip it and edit the adsense.php file - notepad or similar is useful for this task. Find the following section of text:
<b>Your Google Adsense code should be here, but you forgot
to edit the plugins/adsense.php file and replace the code
there with your own.</b>
<script type=”text/javascript”><!–
google_ad_client = “client-code-goes-here”;
google_ad_width = 468;
google_ad_height = 60;
google_ad_format = “468×60_as”;
google_ad_channel =””;
//–></script>
<script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js”>
</script>
Replace this text with the following:
<div style=”float: right; margin: 10px;”>
Your Adsense code that you have retrieved from your Adsense account
</div>
This will float the ad unit to the right. If you would prefer to have it on the left, replace the word ‘right’ with the word ‘left’. When you are creating a post, place your cursor at the beginning of the line where you want the code placed and then click on the Adsense button. The code will be inserted and the ad unit will appear after the post is published. Now you can chose when to insert the code.
This is late news, sorry. But I, along with Tac Anderson and LaSandra Brill participated in a podcast last month facilitated by 1to1 Media (a division of Peppers & Rogers Group). Here is quick excerpt of the podcast (listen to part 1 and part 2), but you will have to listen to the entire thing if you want all the juicy details (it’s almost an hour in length):
What do you find are the biggest challenges when it comes to implementing social media?
Tac Anderson: I think a lot of times there is a lot of excitement and people want to make sure they’re not left behind. But because social media touches so many different business groups within a company, everyone wants to add their piece to it. So the biggest challenge I’ve seen is making sure that the goals are properly aligned with what the medium is for.
Lasandra Brill: Here at Cisco, we’re starting to adopt the Forrester POST strategy (People, Objectives, Strategy, and Tools) for doing that, and making sure that we’re looking at what we’re trying to achieve first before we jump into just what are the tools we want to implement.
Michael Brito: Our biggest challenge is understanding if the people we’re looking to talk to even participate in social media. If they’re not reading blogs, it’s probably not a wise decision to launch a blog. We’ve also adopted the Forrester POST method. They’ve mapped our customer segments -– the people who talk Intel and buy Intel — to various behaviors. That allows us to make sure that we have concrete data and research as we go to market with different projects.
We understand who our customers are, and how they behave online. Then we have to figure out internally what our objectives and strategies are, and then we decide what the tool is. The tool might be a corporate blog, it might be Facebook engagement, or Twitter, or other tools that are available.
Tac Anderson: Sometimes the hardest thing for me to do personally, because I’m such an evangelist for the tools, is to tell people that social media isn’t the right thing to do in an instance. We’re all very eager to prove out what it is that we do, but sometimes it’s not the right tool. You want to make sure that’s clear, because you don’t want to set yourself up for failure.
If you have a chance to listen, please do let me know your thoughts/feedback.
When it’s Blog Catalog of course - or MyBlogLog for that matter. These two appear to be in a head to head race to see who can outdo each other as alternative social media sites as well.
To the outsider it may appear they are competing for blog owner traffic. The reality is that most blog owners, if they are active on one, are also active on the other. The major difference is the level of activity on each of the sites. There is no doubt that most users prefer one over the other, that doesn’t stop them using both.
This is probably a good example of brand loyalty. No matter how many features each of these blog directories add, users are remaining loyal to their favorite. Since the beginning of this year, both sites, more notably Blog Catalog, have added a lot of different features - all aimed more at the social networking aspect than as blog directories.
These two sites are hard to categories now. They are blog directories and they pick up your blogs feeds and deliver them to your profile. They are also social networking sites with forum style discussion streams. There has been talk of live messenger style chatting. While all of this is going on, you can also have a twitter style feed of all your social media activities. What you have dugg, thumbed or promoted in any way - all shared with those that want to share.
As for generating traffic - like anything social, the more you work for the community, the more traffic you will generate.
One of the most important aspects to running any business, online or offline, is the reputation that business’ can build. In a bricks and mortar world, your customers are the primary starting point. There are other avenues such as sponsoring local sports or charities and promoting certain angles such as being green. For an online business, there is an opportunity to develop a blog - this can be a tremendous tool to developing a business’ reputation.
A blog is one area where, with a little careful wording, a business can blow its own trumpet. As a business owner, you can blog about your history, your achievements, your products or services and your personnel.
Being able to interact positively with customers or potential customers creates air of trust. Potential customers can see that you go out of your way to help customers and those seeking information.
If you include pages that show visitors how to use, update or service your products you will find visitors returning frequently. You can also add FAQ pages that are interactive, that is, you allow individuals to comment or add their own experiences.
The end result is a blog that is a perfect advertisement for your business. If you are ever in a situation where negative talk is generated around your products or business, your blog is the first place to start addressing the issues. A business blog is your own publication where you can publish material that may help fight any negative publicity.
Having a blog that has helped to generate a positive reputation is an asset to any business that cannot be measured in simple ROI or dollar terms. A positive reputation is an intangible, but it is one of the most important intangibles any business can possess.
How often do you check your blog for dead links? Doing a regular check is important as it can identify any broken or dead links within your blog, and any dead links leaving your blog.
Having a link that points to a site or page that no longer exists is a waste of a link. You are should remove and dead links and either leave them out altogether, or point them to content that exists.
More importantly, you need to be able to find broken or dead links within your own site. If you don’t delete or rename content, the only issue will be broken links. These are often caused by typo’s when you first created the link.
If you have modified URL’s for some reason, a link checker can help you find the links to the old URL. Update them to new URL and everything will be fine. Search engines don’t particularly like broken or dead links. Incorporating a good 404 redirect page is a must.
Internal links are of particular importance. You have obviously linked two pages together for a reason. If that link is broken for whatever reason then the link proves will halt at the breakage therefore not achieving your desired outcome.
One of the more common problems is the moving deleting of images. If you have used those images in a post and then moved, removed or renamed the image, it will appear on your page as a broken link.
There are several good link checkers:
Dead Links
404 Checker
Xenu
There are many others including plugins for WodPress. Try one out on your site and see how many broken links you have.
This is my second stint at BlogWorld and I am very excited to be sitting on two panels to share my experience working with social media in a fortune 100 company. Last year, I was just a participant and found many of the sessions I attended to be extremely valuable, specifically the closing keynote by Mark Cubin.
The first panel, titled How to Implement Blogs & Social Media Strategies for Big Business is on Friday, September 19th from 3:30 PM to 4:45 PM, moderated by none other than Michael Rubin who works for the Blog Council. Others on the panel will be John Andrews of Walmart and Hillary Weber of Kaiser Permanente. This session particularly interests me because implementing social media in any way is definitely a challenge in corporate America; and I am pleased to be sharing my experiences with everyone.
The second panel, titled, Beyond Blogging: Stories & Social Media Lessons Learned in the Real World on September 20th from 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM will be moderated by my friend and colleague Kelly Feller. Others on the panel will be Tac Anderson from Hewlett-Packard, Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy Public Relations, and Anne Plese from Cisco; many of which are contributors to Conversations Matter social media blog.
If you are attending BlogWorld and read this blog, I’d love to meet you in person. You can also follow me on twitter to get to know me a little bit better, if you like. 
What is the purpose of a blog? More importantly, what is your purpose in hosting a blog? If your answer is purely SEO then I suggest you think again. Blogs can and do help with the overall search ranking of a site when optimized effectively, they are however far more powerful than simple SEO.
Blogs designed for pure SEO are often not terribly user friendly. In fact, whilst they may rate well early, overtime they will struggle to maintain high ratings. Because they are not user friendly, they can scare away more potential business than they attract.
You can often look at a blog as being your receptionist in your business. Most businesses look to hire an attractive yet very efficient person for this role. They are the first and often last person a visitor will see when they visit your business. They are certainly the first person they hear when they telephone.
Your blog is no different. Yes, you optimize it to rank well in the search engines. That is what SEO is all about. Because it ranks well it will receive endless traffic and where is that traffic going, to your blog. The first face the internet visitor is going to see is your blogs. Is it ready? Is it user friendly? Does it say “hi, welcome to …… what can I do for you?”
From your blog, you need to funnel your traffic to your website where the final act can be delivered, be it a sale, newsletter signup or contact form. How your blog is presented will determine whether or not your traffic is funneled to your blog, or back to Google for another search option.