Julianne Wish
This installment of the series focuses on ways that a blog can help your business.
There are many ways that blogging can help you build your business. Here are some of them:
- Networking – Blogging gives you a great opportunity for networking. You should leave the comments function on/open. This gives you an opportunity to interact with your readers. They can leave comments and you can reply to them. Always reply to comments! You can then also visit their blog and leave comments. This builds a base of readers for your blog that will stop by frequently.
- Presence on the Internet. Having a blog gives you a presence online. You can get a URL for your blog if you’d like…the URL can contain some or all of your business name. This gives people two ways to find you.
- Services. When you have a business blog, you can have a separate page about you and your business where you can describe what your business has to offer and how to contact you. You can link to this page when you send out proposals to prospective clients, send out newsletters and e-mails. It is important that you keep this page up to date.
- Portfolio. If you have a portfolio, your blog is a great place to display it. Again, you should set up a separate page for this. Clients can get a good sense of your skills and work. Remember to also keep this page up to date.
- Subject Matter Expert. While you are letting people get to know you, networking and establishing relationships, you are also establishing yourself as a subject matter expert. By writing about your business you are establishing yourself as an expert in your field. However, it is important to remember that you should keep your posts professional. If you get too personal, it will hurt, not help, your business.
The next installment in the series will provide you with the information you need to get started on your own blog!
Julianne Alvarez-Wish is a military wife, mother, business owner, professional writer, blogger and legislative advocate. She is the Director of Communications for Our Milk Money, the Colorado State Leader for the National Association for Moms in Business and the owner of Buy By Mom and Buy By Mom Blog. She is the Colorado Springs Stay-at-Home Mom Examiner for Examiner.com. She also blogs at A Wishful Thought. Her passion, purpose and goal is to help parents work from home so they can be home with their children.
Julianne Wish, Member Contributions, Resource Articles
All of us (mommy) bloggers want our blogs to be successful. Many want to secure advertisers to make their blogs something they can use to not only share their knowledge with others, but to also help support their families by making an income.
In order to do that, blogs need to be successful.
How is that done, you ask? It’s not overly complicated.
The first thing a blog requires is your commitment. You must post frequently. Search engine spiders look at your blog when it starts. They’ll go back in 24 hours and look again for new content. If it’s not there, it will be 48 hours until the next sweep. Nothing new again? The time doubles. Pretty soon, your blog won’t be indexed because the search spiders aren’t looking for new content anymore.
If your blog is in this situation, hate to break it to you… you have to start over with a new blog. Trying to resurrect an old blog is near impossible.
However, you CAN re-use the content from you old blog and get your new one up and running with consistent posting. In fact, when Our Milk Money decided to relaunch and upgrade the business directory, this is exactly what we did. (Worked like a charm!)
The next thing you really want to think about is your keywords. Long tail keywords, or keyword strings, are now used for indexing. Do a search on the keywords you are using to tag your blog posts. Ideally, you want the search to yield less than 100,000 results. Keywords should be nouns, as that is typically what is used to run a search. They should definitely not be ‘flowery’ words. Simplicity works best.
Use keywords people will use to conduct a search so you can be found. When in doubt, think about the words you enter into a search engine. When writing, you can certainly put the words into your own voice, but make sure it is direct and to the point with words every age can understand. You may be tempted to show off your vast vocabulary… and while your mom would be proud, it won’t help you get found. Write specifically. For example, when describing a building, don’t say the beautiful building, say the 1920s victorian style building.
In addition to being specific and using keyword strings, be sure to use your name and the name of your business and company as tags. Make sure to hyperlink tag words that are in the body of your post.
Another important thing to remember when blogging is that once you hit the ‘publish’ button, it is out there in cyberspace for ever! It cannot be taken back.
Set up your blogs to automatically update to your Twitter and Facebook accounts. Be sure to add your blogs to different blog directories, such as:
- Top of Blogs
- Blogtoplist
- Blogarama
- TotalBlogDirectory
- TopBlogArea
- SpillbeanDirectory
- Bloghub
Julianne Alvarez-Wish is a military wife, mother, business owner, professional writer, blogger and legislative advocate. She is the Director of Communications for Our Milk Money, the Colorado State Leader for the National Association for Moms in Business and the owner of Buy By Mom and Buy By Mom Blog. She is the Colorado Springs Stay-at-Home Mom Examiner for Examiner.com. She also blogs at A Wishful Thought. Her passion, purpose and goal is to help parents work from home so they can be home with their children.
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