Internet Business Toolbox» Business

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 …

Business News with RSS

sugeng — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 05:00:25 +0000

Keeping track of business news is an important for business people. With so many things happening in the business world, it is not easy to do so. There are so many hours a day to look through all the newspaper and news website. Luckily, with technology we can aggregate business news with RSS.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is a technology that publishes frequently updated works. It is normally used for blogs and news. The output of RSS is called feed. RSS feeds can be read using RSS reader, feed reader or aggregator. The output format is XML (eXtended Markup Language). This is a universal format that can be read by many different programs.

The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed’s URI (uniform resource identifier) into the reader or by clicking on the RSS icon () in a browser that will initiate the subscription process.

In this post I would like to introduce sending feed to JavaScript that you can post on your webpage. As an example you can see my Business News page. This page is produced using the service from Feed2JS.

First you have to find the RSS source of the web address for the feed. When you are on the news page that you would like to get the feed, you need to find the RSS link (or sometimes called syndication). You can usually find such as:

Just copy the link address and paste onto Feed2JS and follow the instructions.

On your blog, just create a new page and past the provided JavaScript. Just like me, you can put few news feeds on the same page so that you can read all the news together. If you are more advanced, you can even customize the sytle with your own stylesheet. You can do that on the style page of Feed2JS.

Actually there are many other sites with similar features, but I found out Feed2JS is stable and easy to use.

Please share your experience as I am also learning and interested in new and better ways to do things.

JavaScript for Business Blogs

sugeng — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 07:00:47 +0000

JavaScript is a scripting language and an interesting component to the webpage programming. Due to its flexibility, JavaScript has become one of the most popular programming languages on the web. It is also easier to learn. The popularity of JavaScript became even better when AJAX was introduced to the professional programmers circle. Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It is a group of interrelated web development techniques for the creation of interactive web applications. Together with JavaScript, Ajax has brought an increase in web page interactive animation. In fact, we can use JavaScript for Business Blogs.

Primary use of JavaScript is to write functions to be included in HTML pages. Examples of JavaScript are opening or popping up of new pages, changing of images when the mouse cursor moves over them, interactive menus and many other interesting applications. For blogging, ready-made JavaScript can also be inserted into a widget or a post easily for it to function properly. This method is being used by many people to create a fun and interesting blog utilizing embedded music player, changeable mouse pointer, interactive cartoon character online and many others. You can an example at a blog by Garry Shi.

From business perpective, anything that can help drive traffic and let visitors buy more products and more frequently is definitely very welcome. Having said that, it is very important to keep in mind to use only those JavaScript that fulfill the three requirements above, increase customer, increase sales amount and increase frequency of sales. There are many interesting JavaScript applications, but not all can fulfill the three requirements. Some are just fun to look at and contribute nothing. To make it worse, some may cause confusion to your visitors. So, instead of getting interested in buying your products, the visitors got confused and clicked away and never come back.

There are many resources for free JavaScript download available. You can visit JavaScript Engines That Generate Tailor Made Code by Ed Zivkovic for a start. For JavaScript download, you can visit JavaScript Kit download page and The JavaScript Source. For JavaScript tutorial, w3schools.com has various kinds of free tutorial including JavaScript Tutorial. Personally, I also like the JavaScript tutorial at JavaScript Learning Center.

In the future I will introduce some of the useful JavaScript for use in business blogs. In the mean time, please also share JavaScript that you like.

Understanding Website Traffic

sugeng — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 01:00:27 +0000

Website traffic is crucial. Understanding website traffic is even more crucial. Traffic is an important part of business website or blogs. Traffic information is very important to the success of website marketing program. Your business will only prosper when you have a flow of people visiting your website daily. You need to know about how many came, who are visiting, where the people are from, who referred the people and when they came. You need all the information to determine how successful the marketing program, how best to do fine-tuning and to achieve better traffic result. There are many traffic tools available over the internet. Some are free and others are not. They also differ in terms of efficiency and depth of reports available.

Besides having suitable traffic tools, you also need to understand web traffic analysis based on the report from the tools. Looking at the output of any web traffic tools, you need to understand the terms being used. There are three measurements that are normally used with web site traffic. They are hits, pages and visits.

Hits can be a big number but not really meaningful. It can be misleading. Hits are calculated according to how many times all the components of a single page are requested. A single web page may require few requests as it may contain few elements each calculated separately. Each element requires one request. For blogs, since there could be many elements on one web site, the hits for one single page request can be quite high. Examples of page element are the HTML page itself, external style sheets, external JavaScript files and each graphic image.

Pages are also called page views. This is more meaningful as it counts the actual single page display. A page contains many elements and the page view should only count that as one to be accurate. We don’t really care how many times an element is requested, but we are very interested in knowing how many times a page is displayed. Page view is also called unique page view.

Visits are even more current. It is a traffic number that counts the visit by a unique visitor. It is tied to the ability to distinguish between different people visiting your web site at the same time. A visit is usually considered as one or more page views from a unique user within an hour. If another visit is done after more than one hour, it would be counted as another visit.

If you host your own web sites, you may have access to the web log files. A log file records every hit registered by the web server. These data are raw and unfiltered. It is not easy to read and understand the log files. However the information can be very useful especially in understanding the nature of traffic visiting your web site. It is a worthwhile effort learning to read traffic log files.

Traffic tools can be installed locally or hosted externally (web-based) by third party. Examples of locally installed tools are The Webalizer, Urchin (from Google), AWStats and WebTrends. Your web host might have one or more of these already available. Visit the links to learn more about how to better utilize the tools and understand the reports.

Examples of web-based tools are Site Meter, StatCounter and Google Analytics. Those are free of charge. If you need more variety of website traffice tools, here are two sites that have a collection of many such tools available: Analytics Toolbox: 50+ Ways to Track Website Traffic by Mashable and Track Website Traffic: 40+ Great Tools by Technology Magazine.

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.

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.

Welcome to Internet Business Toolbox

sugeng — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 12:23:25 +0000

Internet has become an indispensable tool in today’s live. It is even more so for business. Started as a form of having fun and communication among the scholars, nowadays internet is an essential tool in daily business operations.

There are so many things we can do over the internet. There are many tools developed by people both for fun and for commercial use. There are also unending streams of new tools being rolled out day in day out. With so many tools available online, it makes sense to have a toolbox. Who has all the time to try and use all the tools out there? This is where a toolbox will come in handy.

Internet Business Toolbox is a geared towards reviewing and exploring available and newly launch online tools for businesses. The toolbox will be a collection of the most useful, cost effective, convenient and easy-to-use tools for business.

The blog started as a personal interest in order to keep myself updated of the changes and development in the fast-advancing internet world. Doing business over the internet has become easier and more convenient compared to just a few years ago. It has also become more and more cost-effective. It means that you can achieve more with lesser expenditure. In terms of bottom line, it means better profitability. The cost of doing business over the internet utilizing available tools have come down tremendously.

Business people are busy with running the business. They may not have the time and resource to keep track of fast-pace changes in the internet. This is also true even for online businesses. In fact, business people should spend time running the business productively rather than worrying about the tools to use online. Therefore, I hope this blog will be able to fill the gap and become a complementary resource to successful business people running the business.

To get regular update on Internet Business Toolbox, please click this link.

Please also feel free to leave comment for improvements and suggestions. I am looking forward to forging mutual