Does your business Web site run on WordPress or another blogging application?  I highly recommend using WordPress, not just for business blogging, but for your entire business Web site.  I use it for mine (see the image to the left), and I’d like to start a new series here on BusinessLogs that highlights businesses that use WordPress or another blogging application to create their Web sites.

I’m looking for business sites that look like Web sites, not like blogs, on the home page at least (of course, a blog can be attached to the site, and it should be).  The goal of the series is to not only show how flexible blogging applications like WordPress are, but also to show how great a business Web site can look when it’s built on WordPress (or another blogging application).

Plus, really cool submissions might even be featured in my upcoming book coming out in 2011, “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to WordPress”, but the first priority is sharing the great work businesses are doing in leveraging blogging platforms to create awesome Web sites here on BusinessLogs.

To submit your business site for consideration in the series, just leave a comment on this post with your site’s URL. Chosen submissions will appear in a future blog post with screenshots of your site and links back to your site.

Note that the series won’t critique sites but rather provide an overview of the cool things site owners are doing with WordPress, etc. to build their businesses and brands.

Feel free to share this request with your own audiences via Twitter, Facebook, your business blog, etc.!  Let’s find some really great business sites built on WordPress, etc. to highlight here on BusinessLogs!

One of the unwritten rules of the social Web is that content should not be overly self-promotional.  In fact, publishing content on the social Web that is entirely self-promotional is one of the quickest ways to ruin your blog and your online reputation.  If you want to have a chance at building a successful business blog and grow your audience in order to build your brand and business, then you need to dial back the sales pitch on the social Web.

The reason for this is simple.  No one cares about you.  Instead, they care about how you can help them or add value to their lives.  The key to social media marketing success is engagement and interaction.  No one will want to interact with you if all you ever do on the social Web (including on your business blog) is talk about yourself.

Think of it this way — if you were at a party talking to another person and that person spent the entire time talking about himself, it’s unlikely you’d want to continue talking to him.  In fact, you’d probably want to escape and stay away from that person for the rest of the night and in the future.  You don’t want the online audience to feel that way about you!  Therefore, your business blog content should be primarily non-promotional.

Don’t worry.  You can still publish promotional content if that content is truly useful and interesting to your audience, but don’t go overboard.  You need to provide substance first and promotion second (a distant second).  The power of social media marketing (including business blogging) comes from the customer relationships that develop from it.  It’s an incredibly effective form of indirect marketing that should be a vital component of any business’ long-term marketing strategy.

So then what’s a business owner to do?

I recommend that businesses spend 80% of their time on the social Web engaging in non-promotional conversations and publishing and 20% or less of their time on self-promotional activities.  Additionally, try to ensure that 80% of the content and conversations that are published on your business blog are not self-promotional.  The 20% (or less) of self-promotional content on your business blog, however, should still add value to the user experience on your blog.  Simply regurgitating press releases or marketing brochures doesn’t add value.  Take the time to make sure all self-promotional messages are actually useful to your audience.  Don’t let that day arrive!

Remember the story of the boy who cried wolf?  He continually called for help to be saved from peril simply to get attention until no one bothered responding to him anymore.  Eventually, he truly did need help and everyone assumed he was just “crying wolf” again.  They ignored him again to his detriment.  That story also applies to business blogging and social media marketing.  If you garner a reputation for only publishing self-promotional content, people will start to expect only that kind of content from you.  If that content doesn’t add value to their lives, they’ll start to ignore you.  The day will come when you really do have something valuable to say or share, but no one will pay attention because they only expect self-promotion from you.

Image: stock.xchang

One of the topics I often discuss in my books, to my clients, and at speaking engagements is the value of a business blog not just as a tool to create conversations, build relationships, and develop brands, but also to increase search engine rankings and visitors to a business Web site.

Many business owners think of blogging as a chore that delivers little added-value to a company’s bottom-line, but the truth is actually exactly the opposite.  A business blog is an incredible tool for search engine optimization because of what I call the compounding effect of blogging.

First, you need to understand consumer behavior in the 21st century:

Where do you go to find information about a business, product, store, etc. when you need it? Do you check the Yellow Pages?  Nope.  The vast majority of consumers turn to Google or their favorite search engine (with Google being #1).

Here’s how the compounding effect of blogging phenomenon works:

1. You have a business Web site made up of 20 pages.  That’s 20 entry points to your business Web site for Google to find, index, and deliver in relevant keyword searches.
2. You add a business blog to your Web site, and you publish a blog post everyday for a year.  Now you have 365+20=385 entry points to your business Web site for Google to find, index, and deliver in relevant keyword searches.
3. You publish posts on your business blog and those posts offer interesting, useful, helpful or entertaining content that your audience finds value in.  In other words, those posts are shareworthy.
4. People find your blog content and realize it’s interesting and shareworthy.  They share it on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc. with links back to your business blog.  They blog about it on their own blogs with links back to your blog.  Now, the number of entry points to your business Web site (via your blog) has increased exponentially.  Your Google search traffic increases as all of these additional incoming links to your blog and Web site boost your Google search rankings, and traffic to your site from referrers across the Web increases, too!
5. Your Web site went from a static destination with 20 standard business entry points to an interactive, engaging site with hundreds or thousands (or more) of entry points and an increase in traffic from search engines and referrers!  You can’t buy that kind of exposure!

The compounding effect of blogging really is that simple.  It’s about creating shareworthy content and entry points, and it’s a form of marketing that business owners would be crazy not to leverage!

Image: Flickr

John Reese has a great thing to say about increasing your bottom line. He writes:

I recently had a great discussion with one of the top Internet marketers in the world, and someone who is a very close friend… Frank Kern. In this discussion I asked Frank this question…

“In your opinion, what’s the one major thing entrepreneurs should be doing right now?”

And his answer was simple… “Make offers.”

Making Offers and Business Blogging

This is a great tip for business bloggers as long as you don’t overdo it. After some time of publishing content and promoting your blog, you should have a good amount of visitors checking out your blog. This is a great time to start making offers. Here are a couple ways to do this.

First, you can talk about your products every couple of posts. You might say some interesting things about one of your products every 4-5 posts. Again, don’t over do this and turn your blog into just a sales pitch. Continue providing free valuable content about your industry. This encourages people who are not ready to buy to keep coming back to your blog. Oftentimes these people will buy later on after repeated exposure to your brand. Also, even if they never buy, they may tell their friends about your blog and your company.

Second, try giving your blog readers a discount. Create a promo code that is time sensitive. This would reward your readers that are keeping up with your blog and make them feel special.

Third, at the end of each of your longer posts (400+ words), have a small ad about one of your products. Or instead of a small ad, you can have a small paragraph about the product with a link to the product page.

Fourth, whenever you release a new product, make sure to blog about it.

The reason making offers works is because you’re being intentional in increasing sales. Many people need a little push to support your business before they actually buy something from you.

A blog helps you make offers effectively since blog readers will often perceive you and your company as an integral part of their life. Your blog will put a face to your company and you’ll become like an online friend to them.

And who are people more likely to buy from, a friend or a stranger?

After spending the last couple years watching blogs and blogging myself, I’ve seen several trends in blog life cycles.

First, blogs usually start off strong. They’ll have a consistent posting frequency for weeks and maybe even months. The bloggers are motivated to create a great blog, so the first couple of posts are high quality. This phenomenon is similar to new year’s resolutions. When the new year comes around, many people will start new workout programs or diet plans. They’ll go to the gym on a regular basis or avoid certain foods for the first couple of days of the new year.

However, just like most people that make new year’s resolutions, most new bloggers stop meeting their goals. They’ll skip a post here and there. They’ll write shorter articles. They won’t do as much research or spend as much time writing like they used to. Basically, they won’t put as much effort as they used to. Usually, the lack of effort can be tied to a lack of traffic.

New bloggers often get discouraged because of low traffic. They check their stats and they see that no one is reading their blog. They have no comments to reply to. As you can imagine, if no one is reading your blog, it’s easy to quit or blog halfheartedly. And even if a new blogger does manage to get some traffic, he could still be discouraged if the traffic plateaus for an extended time period.

Marketing is the Key

In my experience, the bloggers that get a lot of traffic on a consistent basis have been blogging for a while (usually over 2 years). So, it’s good to be patient. But what if you don’t have time to be patient especially if you’re counting on your blog to drum up more sales for your business in the next couple of months. Fortunately, there are some bloggers that have reached success quickly. Here’s what we can learn from them.

Marketing is absolutely crucial in the early days of a blog. The bloggers I have seen do well in a short time have spent a lot of time marketing their blog in the early days. Here are a couple things they have done to promote their blog:

• Leaving comments on other blogs
• Writing guest posts for other blogs
• Emailing other bloggers asking them to link to your posts
• Promoting your posts on social media sites

However you choose to promote your blog, the important thing is actually doing it. In your early days, you should spend at least 30% of your blogging time on marketing. My recommendation is to try different methods and then see which ones work the best. Then, focus on those methods and scrap the rest.

You still want to produce good content, but don’t fall into the trap of just writing good content. If you don’t promote your content, how will internet users know it’s out there? There are too many websites on the internet vying for same audience as your blog. Fortunately, most webmasters either don’t do much marketing or they do it poorly. Therefore, you can gain a big advantage by marketing your blog in a consistent manner.

After six months of solid marketing and content production, you should have a solid reader base. And since the internet is more social and interactive, some of your readers will also be content producers. They’ll have blogs, Twitter accounts, Facebook accounts, or accounts on other social media sites like forums.

As you continue to produce great content, those readers will help you promote your site by spreading the posts they like on the social media sites they participate in. The bloggers will blog about your posts. Those with Twitter accounts will tweet about your posts. Your reputation will build as a result and you’ll be considered as an upcoming blogger in your industry. If your industry’s blogging community, or “blogosphere”, has a small amount of bloggers, you could even be considered a top blogger instead of just an upcoming one.

Your main goal as a new blogger is to reach that critical mass of readers who will regularly promote your content. If you look at any popular blog, you’ll see they get a lot of links without doing much promotion because of their reader base. Once you reach this point, your traffic should grow much more quickly. And then, you can probably lessen your marketing efforts and focus more on producing content that has a good chance of spreading since you have a reader base that wants to spread your ideas.

The Pareto principle, or the 80-20 rule, is a famous principle that says 80% of the results comes from 20% of the causes.

Many business people have taken this theory and applied it their businesses.

They’ll look at their salespeople and figure out the top 20% performers. Then, they’ll fire the low performing ones and try to hire people with characteristics similar to the top salespeople.

Or they’ll analyze their marketing activities and see which ones have been the most effective. Then, they’ll stop doing the ineffective activities and spend more time and effort on the effective ones.

The Pareto principle can even work with products/services. A business can figure out their most profitable product and then give that product more promotion than the other products.

How This Applies to Blogging

In blogging, you’ll have to do a little bit of trial and error to figure out the best strategies.

When you first start, you won’t know what works because you don’t have a lot of experience. However, as you begin publishing posts and doing a little bit of marketing, you’ll begin to notice certain things working and other things not working. When this happens, focus on the things that work and stop spending time on the things that don’t work.

Let’s look at some practical examples.

Keywords

Check out your analytics program for high performing keywords. You’ll sometimes find that you’re not fully targeting your best keywords.

For example, let’s say you run an online retail store that sells mp3 players. One of your best keywords is inexpensive mp3 players. However, the post that is doing well for that keyword is titled “Cheap mp3 Players”. You should retitle the post “Inexpensive mp3 Players”. This will make your post increase in the search results and you’ll get more traffic as a result.

Also, if you’re getting a lot of traffic from a short keyword phrase (less than 5 words), it’s usually worth it to create other posts that are based on that phrase. For instance, if you have a lot of traffic from the phrase best rated mp3 players, you should write posts like

The Best Rated mp3 Players for Joggers
The Best Rated mp3 Players for Mac Users
The Best Rated Discount mp3 Players

The reason this tactic works is because many internet searchers will add modifiers to the main keyword phrase. Also, longer keyword phrases have less competition so it should be easy to rank well for them.

I advised my friend on this strategy. She had took her top keyword, modified it a little, and published a post based on the modified phrase. In less than two months, her new post was the fifth most visited post on her blog.

Post Topics

Certain posts on your blog will be a big hit to your audience. They will get a lot of traffic and positive comments.

For example, let’s say you’re a wedding planner and you have a blog to attract new business. You write a post about the timeline in wedding planning. The post does really well and seems to meet a need for many couples. You should take that post and do an series of related posts that cover each event in the timeline with more depth.

Social Media Marketing

I’ve already talked about participating in too many social media sites. It’s much more effective to focus on a few sites. For example, if you’re on three forums and one of them is sending much more traffic than the other two, stop participating on those two forums and focus your efforts on the top forum.

Over to You

What things have worked for you?

I recently opened my RSS reader to get caught up on my business reading. I was greeted with these eight new posts from a particular blog.

Would you have clicked and read any of these posts?

The first post got me curious and I read it. However, I skipped the other posts because their titles didn’t seem useful, interesting, or relevant.

This small event reminded me of the importance of writing attractive post titles.

Judging a Post by the Title

Those seven posts that I didn’t read may have been great posts, but since the titles were subpar, I didn’t even read them.

It may be unfair to judge a post by the title alone. But in our busy world where time and attention are scarce, people are making quick judgments on what information they will consume.

Usually your post titles are the first words people notice. Those words are the prominent words on RSS readers, search engine results pages, and social media sites like Digg. When internet users land on your blog home page, they’ll look at your titles and see if it’s worth reading your blog.

Writing Great Titles

Luckily, you don’t have to be an expert wordsmith to write good titles. There are simple yet effective principles. I’ll talk about some of these principles in future posts, so stick around.

Until then, here are 22 title templates that work well. Try them out on your next posts.

Photo by alifarid

The key to writing interesting content is being reader focused.

A common mistake in blogging is to only write about what interests you. However, by neglecting the interests of your readers, you’ll miss out on a lot of new traffic and repeat visitors.

If you follow some of the top blogs, you’ll find that they’ll often get comments like “This is exactly what I was looking for” or “I definitely needed to hear this”. Those bloggers understand what their audiences want and they give it to them on a consistent basis. That’s what makes their blogs so successful.

How to Figure Out What Your Readers are Interested In

So, how do you find out what your readers want? Here are a couple practical methods.

Browsing through forums is an excellent way to do research on your target audience. What you want to look for are threads that get a lot of responses. The topics on these threads are perfect topics for future blog posts. Also, watch out for recurring questions. Many people go to forums to ask questions. Writing in-depth blog posts that answer those questions will earn you a reputation as an expert.

While were talking about questions, Yahoo! Answers is another place where people ask questions. Simply search using common keywords in your niche and see what questions people are asking in your niche.

Keyword tools tell you the popular words in your industry that internet users are searching with. Writing blog posts based on these keywords will not only make your blog more interesting but it will increase your search engine traffic. Here are two free tools to try out: Google AdWords Keyword Tool and SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool. Enter in the name of your industry and see what related words the tool gives you.

If you have a lot of traffic or a big enough email list, it’s a good idea just to ask your readers what kind of content they want. If you have little traffic or a small list, you might not get a lot of responses.

You Don’t Have to Guess

You could guess what content your audience finds interesting. But why guess if you don’t have to? A little bit of research before writing can go a long way to making your blog more interesting.

Photo by nms_007

Many business owners understand that starting a business blog is a good idea. However, they are hesitant to start blogging because the last time they wrote anything was years ago back in school. They don’t feel like they have the writing skill to attract an audience.

Well, here’s good news if you’re one of those business owners.

If you can talk, you can write.

I got this saying from a writing blog years ago. Unfortunately, I don’t remember the URL or the name of the blog.

You Don’t Need to Be Shakespeare

A common myth in writing is that you have to have your grammar just right and you have to have a big vocabulary or no one will read you. This may be true if you’re writing for a scholastic journal or you’re writing a novel. But you’re not. You’re writing a blog on the web.

The web is an interesting medium. It started out without any commercial elements. And while many businesses have joined the web, the internet has also evolved into a social, interactive environment. Today’s Internet users are not just passive consumers of information. Instead, they are active participants.

They create the information and communicate with other users through sites like Myspace, Facebook, Blogger, and Twitter. Also, many users have their own sites, which they update in their spare time. Most of these people are the average Joes and Janes. They are not English majors or budding authors. So, they are not going to grade your writing like your old English teacher.

The most important things in blogging are not your writing skill and vocabulary, but your expertise, experience, passion, and willingness to interact.

This blogger has over 30,000 subscribers and he definitely is not the most polished writer. His grammar is off in many places. He writes in a very conversational tone. And many of his sentences are clunky and wordy. But he does have something to say. He brings experience and expertise to the table and people listen to him.

I know a blogger from India who has hundreds of subscribers. English is not his first language so some of his blog posts have bad grammar. Yet he has a captive audience because of his passion and consistency.

Write the Way You Talk

As a business blogger, don’t be afraid to write the way you talk. As you write, pretend you’re actually communicating to a specific person that would fit your target audience. There are at least two benefits for doing this.

First, it makes you more personal. It shows that you’re a real person. This build trust and trust leads to sales. Too many businesses are guilty of stuffy, corporate speak. This type of writing makes those businesses seem cold and impersonal.

Second, it lowers your writing time. I believe that much of the time spent on writing is second guessing yourself and over analyzing your writing. However, if you write like you talk, you can write much more freely. And sure, it doesn’t hurt to reread what you’ve written and edit and rewrite as needed.

Traditional advertising is dying.

Billboards get ignored. TV watchers skip commercials with Tivo. The number of radio listeners is going down as people just listen on their iPod to their favorite songs. Newspaper and magazine circulation is declining.

You may think, well, I’ll just advertise on the web. But typical internet advertising is not working as well as it used to.

People are becoming more internet savvy. They are becoming more “blind to ads”. They’ve begun to realize what ads look like so they’re not clicking on them as much as before.

For example, big, flashy banner ads used to be effective at driving traffic a couple years ago, but now a lot less people click on them. These banners ads were replaced by text ads. Text ads get more clicks than banner ads, but as the internet knowledge and experience of online users increases, these ads will get less clicks.

This is already true with younger audiences, since they’ve grown up with the internet. I have a blog that targets the 14 to 30 year old crowd. I have text ads in a prominent location, but I usually only get one click per thousand pageviews.

All these things tell me that people are trying their best to avoid advertising. And technologies like Tivo, iPod, and the internet have made it much easier for them to do so.

So, what’s a small business owner to do? You need to get people’s attention to generate sales. I’ve written multiple times about the effectiveness of blogging to grab people’s attention. But what about advertising? Just give up on it?

No, I don’t think you have to do that. But in a world where advertising gets ignored, you have to do your advertising differently to get noticed. Here’s a simple principle to keep in mind.

Make Your Advertising Useful

Yesterday, I visited MapQuest to get driving directions. On their driving directions page, they had this section at the bottom of the page.

The picture and text highlighted in red caught my attention, because my car was having problems and I was afraid of being stranded during my upcoming out of town trip. I clicked the link and it took me to this useful, informative, interesting article.

By adding useful content to their ad, AutoZone was able to get my attention. However, if they just had the typical “great products and low prices” spiel, I would’ve ignored them.

I like what Brian Clark says:

The plain truth is, great content is the most effective way to advertise online, because to be considered great content, it can’t look anything like what we consider advertising.

So, next time you buy advertising, ask yourself: “How can I add something useful to my ad?”

I’ve written before that offering expert advice on a business blog is a great way to promote your business. The same principle works for advertising. By adding useful content to your ads, not only will you capture the attention of your target audience, but you’ll also improve your brand.