Photo Credits: ariel wants a chip

Should an independent professional blog? Every day, solopreneurs around the world ask themselves that question. While my answer tends to be yes, I would like to touch on some of the caveats about blogging to help make this important strategic decision:

A blog is not a place to pitch product

The main goal of a blog is not to pitch your product or promote your company (although indirectly a blog can help you do that). A blog is a place to sell your ideas, express yourself and help people, with the goal of building an audience that may some day become customers.

A blog is a tool that lets you communicate with your target audience, give tips, and build your reputation and your brand in the process.

Writing well is important

Some “gurus” will tell you to just get out and do it. However, proper blogging requires that you know how to write well. While embedding video and audio to a blog is easier each day, blogs are primarily a written medium, so the importance of good writing techniques should not be underestimated.

Writing well doesn’t mean using jargon or convoluted language. On the contrary, you must be able to convey your ideas using every day language. Since blogs are a web-based medium, it is also important to learn how to write for the web, and use writing techniques that facilitate scannability.

Develop a distinct voice and stick to it

For every topic there are millions of websites out there giving more or less the same information. A search in Google for “Internet marketing” gives you 136 million pages. There are 18 million web pages for “mortgage broker”.

Since we can’t all be gurus nor come up with blinding insights every day, it is important to develop a unique voice or blogging style so that even the most mundane subjects are explored from an angle or perspective that is original, useful and refreshing.

To develop your own voice you have to nurture your biases. Unfortunately, we live in a society where political correctness runs amok, and where much of what we read, hear or see in traditional media and the corporate world has been sanitized to the point of being bland and useless. The goal seems to be not to offend anybody, even if in the process the message becomes irrelevant.

As independent bloggers we have the luxury of expressing our opinions more freely, to stand up for something and stick to it. Some readers will love us and others will hate us. Those who love us will become our audience. The others don’t matter.

Like real estate developer Frank McKinney once said after being told that some people consider his mansions gargantuan and tacky: “Those people are not my buyers”.

Bias is good. If you don’t have strong opinions about how problems in your market need to be solved you will have a hard time building an audience and spreading your message.

Start blogging before you need it

Blogging is a long term proposition, not something you do on a rush because “sales are down this quarter” or because “regular advertising is not working”. Since the benefits from blogging won’t become evident immediately, it is better to start early, even before you need it.

For example, if you’re a corporate soldier who plans to branch out on your own in three years, start blogging now. Your blog will be a nice asset at your service once you’re ready to pull the plug.

Similarly if you are a college student and will be looking for your first job in a couple of years, you can also benefit from starting a blog now (your blog will certainly beat a one page standard résumé and will put you ahead of other job seekers).

Make sure blogging makes you happy as you go

Since the tangible benefits of blogging won’t be apparent overnight, make sure that blogging is something that you enjoy. This will become very important at the beginning, when you will spend lots of time writing articles while your traffic will still be small and few people leave you comments.

You have to be able to give to your blog without the expectation of getting something back from it immediately. Millions of blogs are started every day, only to be abandoned weeks later by bloggers who can’t keep up or become discouraged. Don’t let this happen to you.

Some final words

Now, if you have read this and decide to go ahead and start a blog, congratulations. Your efforts will reap you great benefits over time: you will meet interesting people, make friends and develop your contact list, you will grow as a professional, your search engine rankings will improve as you add more content and more people link to you, and your brand will become stronger and more valuable.

Good luck and happy blogging.

If you have comments of suggestions I would love to read them in the comments section.

Photo Credits: mahatma4711

Beginner bloggers face the daunting task of growing their readership, getting people to subscribe, and building their authority. Here are some tips on how to build an authority blog from three of my favorite Internet marketing bloggers.

Lee Odden:

Lee publishes Toprank, one of the world’s most popular marketing blogs. Approximately once a week, he nominates a small group of selected blogs to become part of his coveted Big List of the Best Search Marketing Blogs on the Net.

Before he nominates a blog he makes sure that the candidates meet some basic criteria, besides having quality content, like:

• Post at least once a week.
• Have a pleasant blog design.
• Take it easy on the blatant AdSense ads.
• Make it easy to tell what your blog is about.
• Make it easy to find out who is writing the blog.
• Make it easy to subscribe to your blog.
• Make it easy to find past posts through categories, related posts, archives, tags, text search.

These guidelines sound basic, but most blogs don’t follow one or more of them.

Skellie

Skellie is an Australian blogger who publishes Skelliewag and also writes for top blogs in the industry, like the Technorati 100, Problogger and FreelanceSwitch. Skellie’s approach to building authority is to provide plenty of value by writing deep, well researched articles.

She also has some interesting insights on how you can project authority by emulating the way authority blogs look:

• Posts on authority blogs show plenty of comments.
• Authority blogs have large subscriber numbers.
• Authority blogs have a professional looking unique design.
• Authority sites favor the 125×125 pixel banner ad format and other understated forms of advertising.

She reminds us that some of these characteristics are self and mutually reinforcing. For example, a large number of comments usually triggers more comments and more subscribers.

Skellie has written at length on how to implement these tips in our blogs in this interesting post.

Aaron Wall

Aaron is an authority on search engine optimization and the author of the famous SeoBook, the first book on SEO supported by a regularly updated companion blog.

He recently published a value-packed articled titled “The Blogger’s Guide to SEO”, from which I am extracting the following tips:

• Don’t host your blog as a sub-domain on sites like Typad or Wordpress. Instead, register your own domain and host your blog on your own web host.
• Write descriptive headlines if you want to maximize your click through rates in the search engines results pages.
• Write more emotionally captivating headlines if your aim is to propagate your posts in social media.
• Use meme trackers, social media sites and competitive websites to find out what ideas are spreading and write about them.
• Highlight your best content in an easily visible “Top Posts” section, so that your users can get more familiar with your site and your brand.
• Tag each post only under one category (the most relevant) to avoid confusing search engines and generating duplicate content.
• Link to other blogs, so other bloggers can find you and eventually link back to you.
• List your blogs in a few popular, high authority directories like Yahoo! and Business.com
• Do some “push” marketing at the beginning, buying ads in Google Adwords, Stumbleupon, etc.
• Don’t monetize too soon: bloggers that slap Adsense above the fold too soon will hardly get any links from high authority sites.

Aside from these tips I would add the following:

• Use the above the fold section of your blog to highlight your most important calls to action.
• Use social media sites like MyBlogLog to build and grow your network.
• Follow these basic trust building guidelines.
• Submit your best posts to social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon.
• Dress up your posts with high quality images.

What other things do you suggest?

Technorati Tags: blogging branding seo marketing copywriting social media

Photo Credits: tinou

Some Flickr members allow you to use their work under what is known as a Creative Commons license. This means that you may use their pictures on your site if certain conditions are met.

These conditions are grouped in four different kinds of licenses, which can be applied independently or in conjunction with each other. These licenses, the icons that symbolize them, and what they mean, are:

Attribution License

You can copy, distribute, display, and modify the author’s work, but only if you give the author credit in the way he/she specifies.

Non Commercial License

You can copy, distribute, display, and modify the author’s work, but only for non-commercial purposes.

No Derivative Works License

You can copy, distribute and display the author’s work, but only verbatim, without modifying it in any way.

Share Alike License

You can distribute modified work only under the same conditions the author allowed you to modify and distribute it.

Examples of Combined Licenses:

You can use it if you give proper credit and your site is non-commercial.

You can use it by giving proper credit, but you can’t modify it.

You can use the image by giving proper credit, but only if your site is non-commercial and you don’t modify the image in any way.

You can use the image by giving proper credit, but only if your site is non-commercial, don’t modify the image in any way, and you link to the page in the Creative Commons site that explains the type of license the image is subject to.

What This Means to You

The best bet for bloggers who want to use Flickr pictures is to find images licensed only under the Attribution license, since they have the fewest restrictions attached.

How to Find Images in Flickr

To find images images filed under the Attribution license go to Flickr’s Attribution License search page, and type the keywords that best describe the kind of image you’re looking for in the search box.

Follow Flickr’s Guidelines for Use

Once you’ve found an image that you like, make sure that you use it according to Flickr’s guidelines. You must hyperlink the image to its original Flickr page and write down the owner’s username under the picture, linking it to his or her page, just like I’ve done with the image below:

Photo Credits: Galfred

That’s it. You can now safely tap into Flickr’s wealth of amazing images to dress up your blog and make your posts come to life.

For more information you can:

• Go to the Flickr Creative Commons page.
• Go to Flickr’s FAQ page.
• Contact the image owners directly.

Technorati Tags: branding marketing blogging flickr creative+commons photography

Web Surfing and Short Attention Spans

When visitors come to your site you have only a few seconds to engage them or lose them. This is especially true when they come from a search engine or from sites that encourage channel surfing, like Stumbleupon. This is why optimizing the above the fold portion of your blog is so important.

How People Read Online

Jakob Nielsen shows us that web users follow an “F” pattern when they read through a page. They read across the first couple of lines (or short paragraphs) of content, and then they just scan down the left side of the page (hence, the “F” pattern):

Google’s depiction of the page sections that generate higher Adsense click-through rates seems to validate these findings.

Both studies imply that the above the fold section of a page receives the highest attention.

Our Top 5 Above-the-Fold Blog Optimization Tips:

1. Minimize distractions: use a two column layout instead of three columns, with your content to the left and the sidebar to the right.
2. Make your post headlines powerful and relevant (the headline of your most current post is the first thing your visitors will notice). If most of your visitors come from search engines, make your headlines descriptive and keyword focused. If, on the other hand, most of your traffic comes from social media sites, make the headline intriguing and catchy (try using these very effective headline templates).
3. Make your paragraphs short, and separate them with descriptive sub-headings. Since users will be scanning down the page, you want your sub-headings to catch their attention.
4. Use the top of the right sidebar to place your most important call to action. For most blogs this means to get visitors to subscribe. Give your visitors at least these three options:
   • Subscribe to your RSS feed.
   • Subscribe by Email. (RSS services like Feedburner offer the option of sending your feeds to an email address).
   • Bookmark you site (you can use a one-stop-shop bookmark button to avoid cluttering your site with lots of different chicklets).
5. Immediately above the place where your content starts, include a prominent link saying something like: “New to our site? Read this first” and hyperlink it to a welcome page where you:
   • Briefly introduce yourself.
   • Offer links to your most popular or most relevant posts by category (this will be easier once your site has a decent amount of content).
   • An invitation to subscribe (again, include all the options: email, RSS, and bookmarks).
   • A way to contact you: you can use a short contact form or offer your email address. Optionally you can also display your IM ID or skype number, and include links to your different social media profile pages (digg, technorati, delicious, etc.)

Technorati Tags: blogging, marketing, branding, social+media

Adding a blog to your site will allow you to publish plenty of valuable, relevant content that attracts links and gives you search engine visibility. Blogs are also a great tool to engage your customers and build your reputation as an expert.

Following are three useful posting tips to maximize your readers’ exposure to your brand:

1. Link to older posts:

As you write new blog posts, you will notice that you often have to reference topics that you have already covered in other blog posts. This is a great opportunity to link to those posts to add context to your new content, and at the same time encourage your readers to click and visit other parts of your blog.

These links will generate additional page views per visitor, increasing your readers’ exposure to your brand. More exposure means better conversion rates (more subscriptions, more sales, etc.). I always make it a point to link to at least three older posts, if possible.

2. Link to other blogs:

When you link to other blogs, the trackback feature supported by most blog platforms will generate a link to your site in the ‘comments’ section of the page that you have linked to.

This is a great opportunity to get the attention of readers from other blogs, who may see your trackback and click to your site.

Try to find quality (high authority) blogs related to your topic that you can link to to emphasize your points, and make sure that the other blog is accepting trackbacks (some bloggers deactivate the trackback feature).

3. Always end your posts with a clear call to action:

Ask your readers to bookmark your post or subscribe to your feed. In good old fashion selling this is called “asking for the order”.

If you look at the end of this post (and other posts in this blog) you will see those two calls to action in a way that comes across as friendly and firm, but not pushy.

Normally, if somebody has read all the way through the end of your post, it’s because they found your post interesting. These readers will be in a very receptive frame of mind and will follow your calls to action most of the time: just give them a gentle nudge… .