Business Logs

The success of your business blog is dependent on multiple components, and three of the most important components are: brand, design and usability.

Think of it this way — your business blog content is only as good as how it is received by visitors.  That means you need to not only write shareworthy content, but you also need to adhere to your brand promise by presenting a business blog that is well-developed and designed.  In other words, brand, design and usability must live cohesively in order for your business blog to be the best it can be.

Let’s look at those three keys to business blogging success more closely:

1. Brand

Your business blog is an excellent channel to communicate your brand promise, messages and image and enables you to connect with and build relationships with consumers around the world.  It gives you a unique opportunity to develop loyal brand advocates who will help you spread the word about your brand, defend your brand, and build your business both on and off the social web.  Follow the link to learn about business blogging and brand building. Read More

Building incoming links to your business blog is one of the most important initiatives you can pursue in order to grow your blog.  Not only do incoming links add to the compounding effect of blogging, but they also help boost your search engine rankings. However, before you go out and try to get mountains of incoming links to your business blog, you need to understand the differences between link building and link baiting.

Link Baiting

Link baiting is a short term blog marketing tactic.  Link baiting refers to the process of writing blog posts for the primary purpose of attracting incoming links and boosting traffic.  Link bait posts are typically written about hot topics, they might break news, or they could be controversial.  Sometimes a link bait post might not even be directly related to the blog topic on which it is published.

Link Building

Link building is a long term blog marketing strategy.  Link building refers to the process of writing shareworthy content and building relationships with people both on and off your business blog in an effort to boost organic links and traffic to your blog.  Evergreen blog posts (that stand the test of time) and pillar blog posts (your very best, most informative posts) are examples of  some of the best link building content you can publish on your business blog.

So how can you marry your short term link baiting tactics with your long term link building strategy in order to develop a successful business blog? Read More

As you work to grow your business blog, you’ll notice that the traffic that comes to your blog from search engines can be significant.  How do you get more of that search engine traffic to your blog?

By using search engine optimization techniques as you write your business blog posts, you can attract more search engine traffic to your blog.  Following are five steps you can employ as you write each post you publish on your business blog to make your posts more search-friendly.

1. Use keywords in your blog post title.

First, do some keyword research to learn what keyword phrases related to your business blog are attracting traffic, and select the keyword phrases that you want to focus on to increase targeted traffic to your blog from search engines.  Then, use that keyword phrase in your blog post title.  Following are suggested tools for keyword research: Read More

When you recruit an employee or hire a professional blogger to write your business blog for your company, you have to give up some control of the content that is published. Let’s face it — there is no point in having someone else write your business blog posts for you if you’re still going to take the time to rewrite them in your own words. With that in mind, you should create a set of written blogger guidelines that provide the important rules you expect your business blogger to follow while writing for you.

Following are 5 commonly used business blogging guidelines to get you started in creating your own list: Read More

As your business blog grows, you’re likely to find that a lot of visitors find their way to your blog through search engines, particularly Google.  While it’s very important do keyword research and use search engine optimization techniques in an effort to increase that search engine traffic (stay tuned to BusinessLogs for search engine optimization tips coming later this week), there are some things that you must avoid, no matter how tempting, else you run the risk of having your business blog banned by Google.

In simplest terms, Google uses a proprietary search algorithm as well as human analysis to detect sites that use search engine optimization techniques which artificially inflate the results Google returns for keyword searches.  If your business blog is caught doing any of the things listed below, your blog will be flagged as spam and may very well be banned from all Google search results going forward.

In other words, don’t do the things listed below if you want to get traffic from Google: Read More

Last month, I put out a call for business submissions asking people who use WordPress or another blogging application for their company websites (not just business blogs) to submit their URLs for a new series here on BusinessLogs that showcases businesses using blogging applications in cool ways.

It’s time to highlight another business doing great things with blogging applications in the WordPress for Business Websites series, and the company website featured today is Le Tutor.

As Aaron of Le Tutor explained in his submission:

“I love WordPress for business applications and advocate that all small businesses convert to using it. It takes all of the pain out of running your own website and you can have an amazing looking website for a quarter of what design agencies will charge you for a sub par site.” Read More

As your business blog grows, you’ll start to receive more comments on your blog posts.  That’s a huge milestone that you should celebrate because it means your content is interesting enough that readers want to actively engage with you.  However, not all comments are good comments, and I’m not talking about comments that offer differing opinions and often in unpleasant ways (and you’ll get a lot of those).  I’m talking about the dreaded comment spam!

Comment spam is bad.  It’s that simple.  Not only does it detract from the conversation happening on your blog, but it also makes it seem like you don’t really care about your business blog, audience or conversations because you can’t even take the time to identify and delete those spam comments.  People who spend a lot of time on blogs can identify spam comments faster than blogging novices, so it’s important that you educate yourself to identify, flag and delete spam comments.

If you use a spam filter or tool like Akismet on your business blog (and you should) then you need to understand that taking the time to flag comments as spam is important because doing so “teaches” the spam filter how to identify future spam.  Simply deleting a spam comment works, but you’ll help yourself in the long run if you flag spam comments that your spam filter or tool doesn’t catch. Read More

If you’ve made the decision that you need to hire someone to write content for your business’ blog, then you need to understand two things: how to find a qualified person to write your business blog and how much you need to pay that person.  You can follow the preceding link to learn how to find bloggers to write your business blog and keep reading this post to learn about how much money it’s going to cost you.

There are many factors that affect how much a professional blogger will charge you to write blog content for you.  A dozen of the most common factors are as follows: Read More

No one wants to read a business blog that is outdated.  The key to your business blog’s success is keeping it fresh with interesting, useful and meaningful content.  That means not only do your business blog posts have to add value to the user experience, but they also need to be published frequently.

There is no single recipe for success when it comes to posting frequency.  Instead, the time and energy you invest in publishing new content on your blog depends on your goals for your business and your blog.  For example, if you’re 100% committed to growing your business through social media and content marketing efforts as soon as possible, then you need to publish content frequently.

Remember, posting frequency is only part of the success equation.  You have to publish interesting, shareworthy content to benefit from the GPS Effect of Blogging for Business.  If you publish content that no one cares about, then it doesn’t matter how often you publish that sub-standard content.  You’ll only be able to grow your blog’s audience to a small extent before your traffic caps out.

With those considerations in mind, following are suggestions for how often you should publish content on your business blog to ensure it stays fresh: Read More

I’m starting a new series here on BusinessLogs where I’ll write about WordPress plugins that are useful to business blogs.  The first WordPress plugin in the WordPress Plugins for Business Blogs series is the Related Posts plugin.

The Related Posts plugin can help boost the amount of time a visitor spends on your business blog and increase page views on your business blog.  It works very simply by adding a list of posts that are deemed to be related to all of the blog posts that you publish on your blog.  The list of related posts is created automatically and is based primarily on keywords, so the list isn’t always perfect.  However, it definitely works to increase page views. Read More