Internet Business Toolbox» Blogging

Business Needs Blog – Why?

sugeng — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 17:00:39 +0000

Blogging is getting very popular. Businesses are also getting on board of the blogging trend. On the other hand, there are also many businesses that are still reluctant to touch blogging preferring to stick with the normal website. The fact is that business needs blog. Why?

Here are few points that hopefully can change your mind on the needs of business to have blog:

1. Keep in touch with current customers
Blog is the most effective way to keep in touch with current customers. Providing the option for visitors to register to receive emails when the blog is updated, blog is the best way to keep in touch with the visitors. The customers will be able to know the latest the business is offering and the promotions the business is having.

2. Update visitors of new developments in the company
Through the blog, the company can easily update the visitors of the latest developments. These can be new products, new services, new promotions or even a new season sale with special pricing for a limited period. In fact, you can also provide downloadable discount voucher from the blog to encourage visitors to purchase from you.

3. Reach out to potential customers
Similar to the previous points, visitors are your potential customers. You can use the blog to turn those people to become your customers with correct message and promotions.

4. Share company expertise
You can also use the blog to share your company expertise. We are not talking about free sharing of the company’s intellectual properties. Some special knowledge can be shared freely. With generous sharing, your company will be seen as the expert in your field.

5. Offer company view on certain topics
With blog, the company can also offer opinion on certain public topics. It does not have to be official but the blog will be able to broadcast your company view effectively.

6. Solicit feedback from visitors
An important feature of blog is the comment section. It allows your visitors to leave comments. This allows effective two-way communication. Of course you can control which comments you desire to appear on your blog. This is important to prevent garbage. When you are blogging long enough, you will realize that not all comments are related and some are even outright spams with uninvited advertisement.

7. Collect ideas and suggestions for product and service improvements
Through the blog, you can also create polling or survey for people to provide their feedback and suggestions. Some people even use blog as the customer support helpdesk with the capability to turn the postings into FAQ list.

8. Build additional web traffic
If done properly, blog can easily achieve higher ranking with search engines. It is due to the blog nature with regular fresh content rich with keywords. Through the blog, you can link back to your main website. With this link, the blog should be able to channel more traffic to your website. Personally I believe this is an amazing feature of blog for small business.

9. Quicker to update and more cost effective to maintain
Blog is very easy to update and maintain. You don’t need a whole IT department to deploy and support your blog. Even installing the blog software is relatively straight-forward. After configuring the blog with desired features, you are practically self-sufficient. You don’t even need to tweak the technicalities to continue posting and maintaining your blog.

Blog or Build

sugeng — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 12:55:21 +0000

SBI (Site Build It!) has an article that discussed whether to Blog or Build. Build here refers to building a website. The article argued that it is wrong for small business to blog. SBI said that blogging is overhyped and not suitable for small business as it is usually the wrong way to grow an online business.

Blogging is actually a different way to build a website. Instead of building web pages, blogs have postings organized by the date and time of the posts. The fact that postings are organized by date and time, it is time-sensitive. Due to this fact blogs are better for news-oriented sites. At the most, blogs can be a strong add-on to an already successful and profitable websites. The article continued to show that most businesses only realize the error of the blog approach too late.

SBI also mentioned that the post’s date and time will be taken by the search engines to degrade the result when the timing has past for too long. Date and time are taken as the article expiration. The dated-content treadmill was also mentioned in the article that referred to the professional bloggers having to do daily in order to churn out quality article timely in order not to face traffic melting away.

Most importantly, SBI is saying that blogs cannot be left away for too long before the traffic and search engine ranking will suffer.

Personally, I agree with all those arguments are true to a certain extent. It is very important for blogs to have fresh content updated regularly, but it does not mean that you need to write article every day. What is required is regularity with quality article. The keywords here are regularity and quality article.

Building theme-based content sites is the ultimate when you go through all the preparation thoroughly. This is the ideal route to go for people starting small business. However, it does not mean that blogs does not contribute to the success of small business.

The emphasis of theme-based content sites is to build a website with good content so that traffic will be driven to the sites. With quality contents that pre-sell, the expectation is for the visitors to be pre-sold and finally be sold with the actual products or services. Whereas, the emphasis of business blogs is to build traffic and to capture the visitors name list, contact information (most commonly is email address) and the license to contact visitors in the future to send them information and other pre-sell materials.

Both approaches have its own merits if used properly and correctly. Personally, I prefer to start with blogs first before developing the content into a full-blown website. Alternatively, I could also turn my blog posts into proper pages using Wordpress so that it will become a proper theme-based content site. I will discuss in the future on how to use Wordpress to build a theme-based content site.

Finally, it is an important decision for you as small business owner to decide if you want to start with a blog or building a website. The question is to blog or build.

In the mean time, you might want to enjoy this video clip on flying and having joy. Enjoy …

Tips for New Bloggers

sugeng — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 01:00:21 +0000

Today’s post will not be very long. I discovered this old blog (dated all the way to Oct 2007) with good content that is still valid today and useful. It is called Tips for New Bloggers.

Tips for New Bloggers has all the tips and tricks on the blogging software, templates, designs, widgets, layout, JavaScripts, HTML codes, SEO, Google Adsense, gadgets, tools and many other things bloggers might want to use on their blogs. Some example of tips are on adding search box, icons and buttons, music, video, animated banners, and all things imaginable to bloggers. It also has tips on editing the header’s and footer’s banner, background attributes and menus. There are also discussions on comments, shout box and language translation flags.

Looking through the blog, I ended spending few hours looking through the content. There were few things I tried including the quote-of-the-day, the google translation and many others. I did not implement them as although they were fun, but they added clutter to my blog.

Well, just visit and look around. You would be able to pick up one or two things that could be useful to your blogs.

Getting Popular with Social Bookmarking

sugeng — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 01:00:43 +0000

Just like my previous post, let’s start this post with a video that explains Social Bookmarking in Plain English by leelefever. The featured social bookmarking site is del.icio.us. It has an Alexa ranking of 2,855 and can be considered quite popular although not the highest for social bookmarking site.

In simple term, social bookmarking is bookmarking sharing. Of course, the other benefit is its use of tagging (a form of metadata) to make bookmark search much easier and faster. It is also called social tagging due to the fact that the bookmarks are available to others through the use of tags as well. Another name for social tagging is folksonomy which means sharing or collaboration of tags or index by the people (creators or consumers) not the experts.

It is actually not a new concept. It started as early as 1996 with online bookmarking service that included public and private bookmarks. There were many online bookmark services that emerged later on based on similar concept with various other added features. It was not until 2003 that del.icio.us (now known as Delicious) was started that it pioneered the use of tagging and coined the term social bookmarking.

Social bookmarking is linked to web 2.0 optimization. It is a powerful tool used in promoting a website by getting the community involvement. The concept is powerful as it is a comprehensive way that gets community involved in making the website popular. This is achieved by bookmarking the site with various social bookmarking services and getting backlinks. As a result, the traffic is increased and the search engines will index the site more quickly.

Here is the list of 20 Largest Social Bookmarking Sites according to eBizMBA. Heading the list is digg followed by Yahoo! Buzz, Technorati, StumbleUpon and del.icio.us.

There are also tools available that help people submit their site to multiple social bookmarking sites. The convenient tools help bloggers by submitting the site with a simple one-click. The most popular ones are SocialMarking, Socialmatic and SocialMarker.

I hope this article has covered enough introduction on Social Bookmarking. If you like this article, I hope you can bookmark it by clicking on bookmark by SocialMarker.

Microblogging is Blogging

sugeng — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 01:00:58 +0000

Microblogging is simply blogging in micro size. It means blogging with brief texts with options to add photos or audi-clips. Due to its brevity, microblogging is very popular with mobile phone users and busy people who don’t have the time to write a bull-blown article for blog posting. Microblogging updates/postings can be anything as long as they are short and within the maximum words allowed. The contents can be on personal level as update of what someone is doing or on the business level with the latest update of products and services. Even news services also use microblogging to disseminate the information to the public (or followers as they are usually referred to).

In terms of content, there is really nothing different between “normal” blogging and microblogging. You can just write about anything and about what you want to write. Of course, in business, people will plan the content properly as to project corporate image. Since the content is brief, it is much easier for people to just write something on-the-fly. That is why people can update the microblogs very frequently in a day. The most common contents are update of what people are doing and thinking. Very frequently also people comment on each other’s postings.

Here is a list of my posts on Twitter.

Currently, the most popular microblogging is Twitter. Launched in July 2006, Twitter has become the most popular microblogging site and its name is almost synonymous to microblogging. Twitter ranked 287 in Alexa as of March 2009. Here are the other popular English microblogging sites (with Alexa ranking): Tumblr (2,551), Plurk (6,629), Jaiku (59,281), Kronologger (347,889) in Indonesia, Hictu (719,358), Pacmee (899,739) in Malaysia, MoodMill (964,712), I Rate My Day (1,066,114) and MySay (1,846,084).

Some social networking sites also provide their own microblogging feature better known as updates. As examples, they are Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Xing and Bebo. There are many coming along as well.

With so many microblogging applications available, many people might want to maintain presence in more than one of these social networks. Services such as SocialThing and Profilatic come in handy in aggregating the updates from various microblogging sites. Another useful service is Ping.fm. Using the Ping.fm, you can send out your update to multiple social networks as it will be difficult if you want to send updates to all social networks that you belong to.

With this short introduction, I hope it has given a brief overview of what microblogging is all about.

Blogging with Wordpress

sugeng — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 13:44:58 +0000

Wordpress is a popular open source blog publishing application. First available to the blogging public in 2003, the current release of Wordpress is 2.7.1 as of February 2009. Open source means that it is available free of charge for the people to use. It is therefore very common for people to do blogging with Wordpress.

Wordpress has evolved around the years with introduction of themes, plugins and widgets into the blogosphere. Those additions really made Wordpress very popular with bloggers due to the flexibility and ease to modify and customize the blogs. They could produce very professional-looking blogs in a short timeframe with Wordpress compared to when they had to do it using the html codes.

Theme is a way to “skin” a blog. It provides control of the look and presentation of the blogs. Without changing the core software, bloggers have the flexibility to change the display of posts and the blogs. By simply modifying some template files included in a particular theme, we can customize the blog’s look on-the-fly without having to worry about compatibility with the application and other components used by Wordpress.

Since it is an open-source application, there are many people willingly working on and sharing the Wordpress theme with everyone. Most of the blog themes are available free of charge. You can just use search engines to find Wordpress theme with whatever additional attributes you may want to have. You will be presented with hundreds if not thousands of websites that have more information on themes. You can also visit Wordpress Theme Directory for a complete listing of officially recognized blogging themes.

Plugins are used extensively to extend the capability of Wordpress blogs. There are just too many things to list down what you can do with Wordpress plugins. Just like the themes, there are many plugins available. Most of them are also available freely on the web. Besides, using search engines, Wordpress plugins are also available at Wordpress Plugin Directory.

Another benefit of using readily available themes is that many people have designed adsense-ready themes. Adsense is a way to monetize your blog. Adsense is simply an opportunity for bloggers to display google ads on their blogs. They will earn money when people click on the displayed adsense. With adsense-ready theme, it means bloggers can configure adsense easily just by entering their adsense pub-id into some parts of the theme files.

A good resource to learn about blogging with Wordpress is available at Wordpress Tutorials. You can visit the site to have tutorials both on blogging and on starting and using Wordpress itself. Check out video tutorials to blog with Wordpress. You can also find free Wordpress tutorials at itheme.

Another interesting site is 63 Essential Wordpress Hacks, Tutorials, Help Files and Cheats. The whole list is very impressive and you will have a much better understanding of Wordpress and be able to use Wordpress more powerfully.

We always welcome your suggestions and sharings of tips and sites on this topic.

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What is Blogging?

sugeng — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 14:15:37 +0000

Let’s start by defining blogging by explaining the meaning of blog. In the early internet time, the term blog was known as web log. In simple term it means record of things kept on the web. It means log in web format, hence web log. Along the way, the term gets shortened to blog. So, what is blogging? It is an act of creating post for and maintaining the blog. Blogging is just like keeping a diary (log) online.

The world of blogging is also called blogosphere. This is referring to the world of blogs with all the contents.

Nowadays many blogs are started everyday. According to Technorati statistics done in 2007, there were about 120,000 blogs created every day. Those were about 1.4 blogs created every second of every day. When translated to posts, there were about 1.5 million postings per day, which meant that 17 new posts were created every second then. Compared to mainstream media, blogs are getting more and more popular. In fact, blogs have become alternative for people researching for news, information and data over the internet.

Looking from language perspective, we can see an interesting trend from Sifry’s Alerts written by David Sifry (founder and CEO of Technorati). In 2006, Japanese has taken over English as the most popular language used in the Blogosphere followed by Chinese and Italian at third and fourth place.

How to start blogging? It is very easy to start a blog nowadays. You have a choice of doing it on free blog hosting like blogger, wordpress, typepad, etc. Alternatively, you can also choose to host your blog yourself. For this, you just need to have a domain name and a web hosting. The most popular application for blog self-hosting is wordpress which is included in popular web hosting packages.

Once your blog is up, you can start blogging. You can start writing and posting the posts according to the area you would like to focus on. For business purpose, the blog should contain updates to the business, new offers and even valuable reports for your target markets. For personal, it can contain anything you would like to have and to write.

When you have enough content, you can start to think of monetization for your blog. Monetization means thinking of ways to make money blogging, making money from your blog.

[Added on 7 April 2009]
From the outlook, blogging seems to be very easy to start. However, it really requires strong determination from the blogger. At least for the start, it is recommended to have a minimum of three postings per week. It is better if you can write a quality posting a day. This is the only requirement for the start to be successful. [/add]

I have gone through this path of self-discovery on blogging. It was fun but required much effort and energy until I found out lately about Atomic Blogging version 3.0. It is a complete step-by-step tutorial guide on creating profitable blog. It is suitable for beginner and intermediate bloggers to start profitable blogging. It includes eBook, search-engine-optimized templates and useful plugins. I like everything with exception of one thing. I realized English is not Alvin Phang’s first language and I found out there are just too many things I would need to edit and correct if I were the editor of the eBook.

You can watch a short video clips on the Atomic Blogging version 3.0 below.