Business Blogging - How to Build A Better Blog

What Business Bloggers Can Learn from Hobby Bloggers

This is a guest post by Linda Dessau of ContentMasteryGuide.com

While business bloggers have the ultimate goal of attracting prospective clients, hobby bloggers have a whole other set of motives. Here are just three of them, along with some ways you can apply them to your business blog:

Free Your Passion

Hobby bloggers have the liberty to indulge in deep exploration of their passions, wherever that journey takes them. In an earlier article about what happens when artists call their art a hobby, I noted how that "means freedom from the creative constraints that might be involved once you claim it as a business." 

Business bloggers, take note: It's easy to get caught up in how you're going to "monetize" your blog and transform readers into clients. While it's definitely necessary to be thinking about your ideal clients and what they're looking for, if you stray too far from your own expertise and passion you will just dilute your message.

Ideally, what they're looking for is the same as what you're really good at and love to do. Once you've figured out what that is, Michael J. Katz says that doing anything else is just "a self-perpetuating distraction." So don't get distracted too much by always trying to blog about the "right" things. Invite more passion into your blog and see who is attracted by that.  

Here's an example of a passionate blog: Voted as one of Time Magazine's Best Blogs of 2011, Smitten Kitchen author Deb Perelman must be full of passion. Otherwise there's no way she could pull off these delicious-looking recipes in a galley kitchen and share them on such a stylish and well-organized blog.

Six Essential SEO Strategies for Bloggers

Bloggers can never get enough advice about SEO. This is a guest post by Chrisian Arno at Lingo24.

 Six Essential SEO Strategies for Bloggers

When a blog forms part of your marketing strategy, you need to be confident your words will reach the right people. With search engines constantly refining their algorithms, not to mention the huge amount of information competing for your readers, this can seem like an impossible task. Here are six strategies that can help you regain your confidence with SEO.

Do Your Research

If you are someone who dashes off blog posts when inspiration strikes, slow down a little. Keyword research might seem like a chore but this tried and true SEO strategy remains one of the best ways to let search engine robots know you have something to say about a certain topic. Take a moment to find out what questions people are asking and then set your post up to answer it or promote further discussion. If you can echo some of their search terms in your post, the search engines will make the connection and start sending those people in your direction.

Blogging Without Dates - The pros, the cons and meeting in the middle

This is a guest post by Linda Dessau of ContentMasteryGuide.com

In his October 2011 post about why you no longer need a blog (in the traditional sense), John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing predicts that soon our content will "no longer be consumed in chronological fashion."

When Jim Connolly of Internet Marketing Jam explored the question of why people remove dates from their blog posts, in the end, he came to the conclusion that for his blog, the benefits far outweighed any risks.

What are the pros of blogging without dates?

What benefits did Jim Connolly see? People were spending more time on his site, and older posts were getting more views, comments and social media mentions.

His feeling was that people are sometimes turned off by seeing that a blog post is "past due," whether to them that means it's a week old, a month old or six months old. They simply won't click through to read it.

Removing the dates, he says, allows your blog post titles and topics to stand on their own merit without that filter. It puts all the focus on the content and makes it easier for your readers to find what they need.

Dateless blogging also gives you more freedom to update existing posts - simply treating them like any other page of your website.

What are the cons of blogging without dates?

Pitching to bloggers - the do’s and don’ts of blogger pitching

This is a guest post by Kristy Shaw of Punch Communications.

Pitching to bloggers… the do’s and don’ts of blogger pitching

Life as a PR has certainly changed over the last few years; with the rise in popularity of blogs it has meant having to adapt the way I pitch to different types of media. Bloggers can be just as influential as many print publications and therefore should always be on PR agencies radars. 

Pitching to bloggers is a world away from traditional pitches to journalists; there are many more things to take into account. For example, in contrast to traditional media journalist’s blogging may not be the full time job of the writer, but instead something they are passionate about or a hobby. 

Building a rapport with a blogger can be just as easy as building a relationship with a journalist. Here are some top tips for pitching to journalists:

Two Tips for Generating More Leads on Your Business Blog

Recently I joined the Social Media Biz School as an instructor. In the video below, I share a couple of the business blogging tips to give you a taste of the kind of strategies, tactics, tips and tools you'll be learning in the free 27 minute webinar on demand: How to Generate More Leads with Social Media...

[Can't see the video in your blog reader? Click here to watch on YouTube.] 

You can get instant access to the free webinar here. Your instructors are: Viveka von Rosen (LinkedIn), Lori Gama (Twitter), Andrea Vahl (Facebook), Lou Bortone (Online Video) and me (Blogging).

Get more information about our special offer to join Social Media Biz School here.

Buffer

The BIG SEO Secret for Bloggers

This is a guest post by Adam Stetzer of Hubshout.

The BIG SEO Secret for Bloggers

I talk to bloggers just about every day. For a while last year my blogging blog was on page 1 for the Google search "blogging", though we are now on page 3. With this type of exposure comes some crazy organic traffic. In fact, over 39,000 bloggers have registered with my blog since I opened it in 2007. With each passing year I am continually amazed by just how many bloggers are convinced that there is a BIG SEO secret out there. The conversations seem to follow a familiar pattern. It goes something like this. 

Blogger: "Hi Adam, how can I get to page 1 in Google?" 

Adam: "It's a TON of hard work, very incremental, takes a long time and requires some really good content and some awesome backlinks." 

Blogger: "Thanks, I've heard all that before, so tell me REALLY how to get to page 1 now." 

They are convinced there is an SEO secret that I won't tell them. These bloggers feel that if they could just discover the piece of knowledge they don't have, they will be richly rewarded with huge rankings, traffic and money. They just know it. Since this sentiment is so prevalent, I've made it my mission to try to set the record straight with the truth about SEO. And the truth is: The big SEO secret is that there is no SEO secret. 

The BIG SEO blogging secret: There is no secret

5 Tips for Beefing Up a Short Blog Post

This is a guest post by Linda Dessau of ContentMasteryGuide.com

In How to Be a Weekly Blogger, I remove the pressure of having to write a feature article for your blog every week.

Instead, I suggest that you aim to write one feature article per MONTH, and then in the weeks in between you can play off that topic with connective content.

Connective content combines your expertise and opinion with something that's already been created; whether that's a post on your own blog or someone else's, or a movie, book, website, product or story that relates to the topic of that month's feature article.

How to turn a blog post into an article

The funny thing about relieving pressure is that it can really open a channel for creativity. You may produce some wonderful content this way, and you may decide that it deserves a bigger audience - whether that's via an article directory or as a guest post on another blog.

Social Networking Poll - Have you voted?

If you missed it on DeniseWakeman.com, I'm taking a short, one question poll to find out what social networking site you use the most for business purposes.

If you haven't voted yet, I would appreciate it if you would take one minute to click over to the poll and vote.

Thank you and blog on!

Blogging Brings YOU into the Writing

This is a guest post by Linda Dessau of ContentMasteryGuide.com

In academic writing or journalism, we're usually asked to chose whether we're going to write subjectively (an argumentative or persuasive essay, opinion piece or editorial) or objectively (an expository essay, investigative report, profile or news feature).

In blogging, we see a delightful mixture of all of these types of content, sometimes even within the same blog post. Here, you can bend the rules and choose both objective and subjective writing. You can bring more of yourself into everything you write, not just your personal posts.

For example, we may offer practical action steps about how to implement the ideas in a passionate thought piece, or we may introduce a "how to" post by telling a story. After all, people learn just as much from our experience as they do from our expertise.

When I visit a blog, I'm not just looking for information. I want to get to know the voice and personality of the business owner behind the blog.

You may have some concerns about using a more narrative style of writing, especially if you'd had lots of experience with more formal styles of writing. For example:

Shouldn't my blog posts be all about helping my reader, not about me?

The Art of Planning Your Blog

This is a guest post by Mitch O'Conner.

The Art of Planning Your Blog

Thinking of starting a blog? So is everybody else. According to BlogPulse, there are over 174 million blogs on the Internet as of October 2011, and over 7,000 new blogs are created every day. On the other hand, a 2008 Technorati survey indicated that 95% of blogs end up being abandoned - meaning that the vast majority of bloggers either post very infrequently or completely give up on their blog within a very short amount of time (sometimes after a couple of months, sometimes after a single day).

But this doesn't mean that there's less competition - it simply means that blogging is hard. It takes a lot of work to develop and maintain a blog, and even if it's well-operated, there's still no guarantee that you'll get a lot of traffic or see any income being generated. This is why it's almost impossible to overstate the importance of planning. The more you think ahead, stay focused on your goals, and keep your basics covered, the higher your chances will be of becoming successful with blogging.

What Will You Blog About?