Best Blogging Software

Business Blogging Basics

October 19th, 2011

A crash course in blogging is what you need. By picking up the lingo and the basic concepts you can be adept at blogging in no time.

Start with the Vocabulary
To understand blogs, start with the basics: terms like blog, platform, domain, and web host.

Blog is short for “web log”: a series of online posts presented in reverse chronological order. It’s the seed of the Social Media concept that new is good. It’s also
what news has been doing since the days of town criers. Most blogs are text, but there are also photo blogs and video blogs.

A blogging platform is a web app– a computer program that allows you to write posts and to update your blog. Most platforms allow you theme the look of a blog: color scheme, layout to font size.

The web host is a service. That service runs computers set up to communicate with other computers– user computers that are called clients. The clients are what users read from. To find a web host, if an exercise in of itself. On top of the hosting, your blog needs to have a fixed url– something that people can come back to. Blogs are commonly run on domains. The domain is the online address of your blog, and usually ends in ‘.com’.

Once you have mastered these key elements of blogging, you can enter any conversation about blogging with confidence. After you know what exactly a blog is, you will be on your way to passing as blogger.

Focus On Business In Your Blog
Blogging is a terrific way to get the word to your audience. If you are looking for a way to take your business to the next level, consider what starting a blog might be able to do for you. It can bypass the traditional methods of publicity to get right to you audience and it can even be useful for inspiring employee loyalty.

Blogging for business is a sub-set of general blogging, but the general principles of blogging hold. Still it has its own unique pitfalls and strengths. Keeping your goals clear and concrete at every step of your blogging adventure is key. Think of it as a conversation you may have with your customers in your shop. So don’t get sidetracked and maintain decorum. You can get easily sidetracked, especially if you’re just learning about the dynamics of blogging. Write up a plan for how often you will update, how you will promote your blog and retain readers. Make some internal rules and stick to them: how often you will post, what topics you will cover and whether you will feature photographs or video.

Corporate blogging is a relatively new idea. Some consider it a controversial marketing tool. Many companies are looking for ways to capitalize on the blogging trend, and many of these corporations have determined that a great way to ride the blogging wave is to keep a blog on their corporate website. You may want to be a little irreverent and keep a separate blog that feeds publicity to your main web site. Blogs need to appeal to the demographic that the company needs to court, and the content may have quite a lot to do with the activities of the corporation, or it may have very little to do with the company itself. Often, a corporate blog will focus on the kinds of content likely to attract the desired surfers, even if that content is not related to the product or service that the company provides.

Some of your audience may feel that corporate blogging is a kind of validation for the blogging movement. Bloggers consider the kind of viral marketing that corporate blogs practice to be unethical or distasteful. In any case, watching the evolution of corporate blogs. But corporate blogs have been around for several years. If exhaustion with Social Media takes hold, establishing a blog for your business may allow you to ride a second wave and control your message.

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Infecting Your Blog With Some Viral Marketing
Many methods and schemes exist. Some of those that can help you with an extra boost in the popularity ratings. One of these is the so called Viral Marketing. The irrevence of blogging makes it a fertile ground for a viral marketing campaign to take root. If you try to launch a viral campaign, it’s one virtue for a site to hold. With so many competition and rivalry going on, every method of marketing must be employed and utilized. It doesn’t matter if you have a killer product or a super cool website, if people don’t know that you exist, it doesn’t matter, and you are not going to make it big. Worse of all, your business could just get killed if it backfires. Always take the high ground when you try to a viral marketing campaign.

Viral Marketing, aka Viral Advertising, is a marketing technique used to build the public awareness of one’s product or company where users spread the message instead of using paid advertisers. They use many forms of media to reach out to the public without actually promoting the product by riding on in other forms of addictive means that could get a person hooked and be obliged or amused to actually pass it on, with the product or company advertisement along with it.

In a nutshell, companies ride on the idea that if people like the content of a media they will pass it on to their friends and family. They sponsor the certain media, such as a cool flash game, funny video, amusing story and such, which one may pass on to another with the company brand or logo or the products description or any other content to help promote the company or its product.

Viral marketing has become a popular means of advertising and marketing because they are relatively low cost. To avoid being tagged as spam or being seen as disingenious, viral marketing depends on the eagerness of one person to pass on the masked ad to friends. If a person sees the name of the person they know as the sender, they won’t block it and open it as well. It’s a process called “social proof” where one person trusts it because their friend trusted it.

Many companies offer incentives such as discounts and rebates when they help in spreading their viral marketing. They rely on the number of recipients a viral marketing gets from one person in determining the amount or number of incentive they can be attributed with.

The main advantage of viral marketing is that it gets you a level of public awareness about your site and your company. You get to generate a flow of traffic that are potential customers. With a little ingenuity and imagination, plus some incentives or prizes, you can reach out to a great number of people and announce your existence.

Most every site and companies are catching on to the effectivity of Viral Marketing and Advertising. Not using it could kill your business. Along with other schemes and methods in promoting your site, like Search Engine Optimization and such, viral marketing could easily push you ahead in the rating games.

Viral Marketing could be a sneaky way to get people to know about you and your company. You get them to pass your advertisement along. They are also very low cost that not investing in it could be downright a business suicide. All it takes is a great idea, a good addicting game, a funny story many ideas are still out there. Create a gossip or a buzz, many movies are promoted by using scandals and gossips to make them moiré popular. Remember the movie “The Blair Witch Project”?

Many big companies have tried viral marketing and have had many success stories with it. A classic example is Microsoft’s Hotmail. They were the first known big company to utilize the scheme and it has worked wonders for them.

Some simple rules for a viral campaign: Be a little big sassy. Lean on pop-culture to give your idea a boost. Don’t take the consumer for granted. Make the marketing nugget easy to share. Make sure people can take your blog post and share it around.

Distilling Traffic Into Sales
The success of a business hinges on its volume of traffic– how many users visit. More visitors equal more sales. Here are some methords you can use to improve traffic to your blog and traffic to your main site to generate sales. In other words, turn a bigger percentage of your audience into your customers.

First: add a personal touch. Nobody wants to be sold to by a total stranger, but many people will buy what their close friends recommend to them. Your blog is a great way to reach out and convey that human touch. Convince your audience that you are a personal friend who has their best interest at heart. Convince them to buy your products. Remember to speak to an individual in your salesletter, not to your whole audience: “you” not “all of you”.

Second: Publish testimonials and comments from your customers. A blog makes this easy, because the comments can become a well of testimonials and passionate discussions. A good idea would be to publish both good and bad comments; that way prospects will be really convinced that these testimonials are real. Nobody believes that all news is good news. In your corporate site, this could be a liability and a confused message. The informal tone of a blog makes this easier to get across. When prospects see testimonials on your website, they will have the confidence to buy from you because human beings follow the herd mentality; when others have bought and proven it authentic, they will jump on the bandwagon and buy too.

Third: People love picturew! Use visuals for the problems and solutions that you offer. Not everyone will read your text copy from the head to the tail, but most people will pay attention to images on your website. Infographics and charts are wonderful for doing this.

Fourth: Run something like an affiliate program. People love bonuses, swag and goodies. Offer quality bonuses to accompany the product. When you offer bonuses that compliment your business, your prospects will feel like it’s a good deal. Be sure to state the monetary value of your bonuses so that people will be even more compelled to grab your good bargain.

Lastly: give people a call to action. Make it clear that you want to convert them without clubbing them over head with that message. Many people entice their prospects with the benefits of their product, sell to them with stories of how it has solved many problems, even offered killer bonuses but forget to ask for the sale. Give a clear instruction on how to buy your product (e.g. “click the button to buy now!”).

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