Business Blogging - How to Build A Better Blog

Time to Think: the missing ingredient in quality blog writing

Think before you write on your blog.

What a concept! A great guest blog post over at Copyblogger by James Chartrand, author of the blog Men with Pens suggesting that if you want to write killer copy for your business blog, you actually allow yourself thinking time!

Yet how few of us give ourselves permission to bask in the luxury of creative thinking time. Actually, it's a priority if you want your blog to work for your business instead of you working for your blog.

I've noticed a slow down in the number of blog posts I've been writing for both this blog and our other two main blogs, WritingontheWeb.com and BizTipsBlog.com. Why would I do that since we all know that the more frequently you post, the more traffic comes into your blog?

It's because I've stopped being a mere reporter of what's on other people's blogs. I've recognized the need for original thoughts and quality posts, and you can't just whip those out lickety-split like a normal blog post.

Which means that more often than not, a quality blog post is going to take more than the 20-30 minutes a normal post does. It doesn't take longer to write a quality post; it takes longer to research, read books and materials, and to think about the concepts you're going to write about!

Next time you post, think long and deep about quality, rather than speed and quantity.

StumbleUpon: How to Use it

You have probably noticed that at the end of each post on this blog, there are several links, one of which says Stumble It!.  If you don't know yet, the link goes to StumbleUpon. (It's set up on TypePad blogs by Feedflare.)

StumbleUpon is a tool that offers you website recommendations based on your preferences and reviews or recommendations from people who have similar interests.  It helps you connect with other people who have similar interests, it saves time browsing through search engine results, and it introduces you to sites you may not have otherwise found.

Here’s how to use it:

Step 1.  Head to the website, www.stumbleupon.com and click Join Now.

Step 2.  They’ll ask for your email, your user name, your birthday, gender, and a few options for you to check or uncheck.

Facebook for Business: TeleSeminar on March 10

Facebook expert Mari Smith had this to say about Facebook when we asked her the #1 reason why a business person should be on Facebook:

Your prospective paying clients are already on Facebook; they’re easily and instantly accessible, they’re volunteering huge amounts of personal information, and they’re looking for your services. Why let them go to your competition?

Join us on Monday, March 10 at 5 p.m. Eastern Time for a 60 minute teleseminar on how to use Facebook to strategically build your business.

Details and registration: How to Use Facebook to Strategically Build Your Business .

Related post:
Facebook: 10 Reasons to Use It for Business
Facebook Can Drive More Readers to Your Blog

Blog Post Life Cycle: What Happens When You Post

By way of a colleague I got a link to an article in Wired Magazine called The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits — to You.

There is a very cool graphic that shows you exactly what happens when you publish a post on your blog. You can trace the path from a thought to the post, to the servers to the spam bots to the search engines to the feed readers to the sites that analyze what's going on on the web, finally all the way to the reader.

To see the graphic you have to hold the left click button on your mouse and then you can scroll through the image and follow the trail of a blog post.

3 Questions to Ask Before You Choose a Blogging Platform

Yesterday a client called me and his story is not unfamiliar to The Blog Squad...in fact, we hear this tale of woe more often than we'd like!

Let's call him Jerry. He's a pretty savvy guy, and like many professionals, busy with his clients. So he asks his web designer about blogs. Web-guy agrees, he should be blogging to promote his speaking and book events. Web-guy says, "no problem, I'll set it up for you."

Next thing Jerry knows, he's got a blog, all ready to go, set up on a WordPress platform. Only thing is, he can't use it. He can't change anything on it without going through Web-guy, being charged for it, and having the usual delays. Neither can he post on it, although Web-guy did offer to show him how for a fee.