Blogging Tool – Disqus

Small Business Tips, Social Marketing (Web 2.0) No Responses »
May 172012

In a recent post, I gave you 17 tips for your small business blog.  In this post I am recommending a helpful tool, Disqus (pronounced “discuss”), you can add to your small business blog. 

Disqus is a real-time commenting system you can add to your blog.  Below is a list of several major features of Disqus.

  • Integrates with the major social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc so it makes it easier for users to sign-in without having to create a separate account with your blog.  
  • Allows readers to subscribe, like, and share comments across their social networks.  
  • Offers a notification system that lets your blog readers know when they have received a reply to their comments, and it allows them to reply directly from their email.  
  • Provides a spam filter for your commenting section. 
  • The comments are indexable by search engines so it is SEO-friendly. 
  • And there are tons of other features as well.

Disqus Blog Comments

Disqus is compatible across all the major blog platforms.  I use WordPress, and you simply download and install the plugin.  You can also export your existing comments.  Check out Disqus, and as always if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to comment below.

Posted by Trey at 1:38 pm Tagged with: ,

Blogging Tips

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Small Business Tips, Social Marketing (Web 2.0) 2 Responses »
Apr 182012

I have always recommended blogging as a key part of a small business online marketing strategy.  Blogging allows you to interact with potential clients on your website, is a good way to allow visitors to promote your content, helps with your SEO strategy, and is a good way to provide timely and helpful information to your clients.  So with that introduction in mind, here are some blogging tips to help you take your small business blog to the next level.

Blogging Tips

  1. Pick a good blogging platform.  I prefer and use WordPress, but there are several good platforms out there.  See this blog post where I reviewed several blog platforms.
  2. Do what I just did in number one.  Link to your other relevant blog posts, and consider writing a blog post series to keep readers coming back.
  3. Be consistent.  Pick a schedule and stick to it.  I used to write daily blog posts, then as I got busier, I slowly dwindled down to a few blog posts each month.  If you have a dedicated marketing person for your small business, then a couple of posts each week will be about ideal. 
  4. Write good content.  Easier said than done, right!  So what is “good” content???  Well it needs to be easy to read, and you need to provide something useful for your potential customers.  If you are using your blog for sales and marketing purposes only, you will probably find you have few readers.  Consider using your blog to provide tips, how-to posts, and other types of useful information.  My blog posts are probably about 95% useful information, and the other 5% is links back to the services I offer on my website.  At most I would consider 80/20 with 80% being useful information and 20% promoting your products and services. 
  5. Do not just write for readers, but consider search engines as well.  So how do you do this?  I use a WordPress plugin call All in One SEO, but essentially you need to provide meta tags for titles and descriptions of your blog posts.  Keep your content fresh, and link within your blog posts, websites, and to other websites.
  6. Use a call to action and encourage readers to comment about your blog post.
  7. Provide social share buttons to allow readers of your blog to easily share the content with their social networks.  See below each of my posts for an example.
  8. Use eye catching images to show details on what your are writing about or just to break up the content.
  9. Consider video blogging.  Video blogging is especially helpful when you are trying to show customers a how-to.
  10. Allow guest blog posts to provide a different and useful perspective to your readers.
  11. Provide a search box.
  12. Provide an RSS feed.
  13. Provide a way for readers to subscribe to your blog via email.
  14. Provide Categories based on the different topics you write about, and write posts to fit into your Categories.  See my sidebar for example Categories.
  15. Use analytics to measure how readers are using your blog, what they are most interested in, inbound links, and how readers are socially sharing your content. 
  16. Check for grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
  17. And finally promote your blog.  Link your blog to your other social marketing networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.  Link your blog in free directories.  Use tools like Onlywire to publish your blog post to multiple platforms at once.

Follow these tips to create a successful small business blog.  And if you have any additional tips, please feel free to list in the comments below.

Posted by Trey at 2:46 pm Tagged with: , , ,

A blog should be a key part of your SEO strategy

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Small Business Tips, Social Marketing (Web 2.0) No Responses »
Jul 152011

If you are having issues achieving higher search engine rankings with your small business website, a blog might be the answer for helping you improve your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.  Blogs are also excellent social marketing tools, and I have covered blog social marketing strategies in several posts so today’s post will focus on the SEO benefits of small business blogging.

Here are three reasons why blogs are good for your SEO strategy.

  1. They are an excellent format for providing updated content to your website domain, and search engines love new and unique content.
  2. Blog platforms such as WordPress were built with SEO in mind providing automated services like pinging (alerting) search engines to new content, ability to customize link urls, and the ability to add-on SEO plugins which allow you to create items like unique page titles and descriptions.
  3. Blogs provide a great format to allow others to easily link back to your site and share your content within their social network.  Write great and useful content, and people will share it.

So now that we have established the SEO benefits of blogging, lets discuss some tips you can follow to make sure you can achieve those benefits.

  1. Pick a strong blogging platform.  I covered several blog platform options in a previous post. 
  2. Link to content on your website as well as other blog posts, and use keyword phrases as your links. 
  3. Make it easy for readers of your blog to share your content.  See the social share buttons below this post for an example.
  4. Add SEO plugins to your blog platform.  For example if you have a WordPress blog, All in One SEO Pack is an excellent SEO plugin. 
  5. Good code is also important.  Check your blog for broken links.  Check your blog page download speed to make sure it is not slow.  Make sure you add titles and descriptions to each blog post page.

Add a blog to your website, and follow these tips, and you will improve your search engine rankings.  If you have some examples of how your small business blogging has helped you increase your search engine rankings, please feel free to share in the comments below.

Posted by Trey at 9:19 am Tagged with: , , ,

Dueling articles – Blogs are Still on Top vs Blogs are Dying

Social Marketing (Web 2.0) No Responses »
Feb 252011

In today’s blog post I am linking to two dueling social marketing articles. The first article makes the case why blogging is still the top social marketing tool while the second article argues that blogging is dying and Facebook and Twitter are where it’s at in social marketing.

Dueling Articles

Pro Blog – The Hierarchy of Social Media Marketing

vs

Pro Facebook and Twitter – Farewell, Blogs! Your Days Are Numbered

My opinion is this, and by the way, it is the right opinion. You need at least two social marketing platforms (so ie. you need both), and you need to become an expert at both of them. You need a blog, because as is pointed out in the pro blogging article, blogs are better for search engine optimization (SEO). And you need another social marketing platform like Facebook, Twitter, and/or LinkedIn because this is where many of your potential clients are spending their time online, and it is easier for you to engage them directly.

The social images I used in the image I created above are free and courtesy of Productive Dreams.

Posted by Trey at 12:49 pm Tagged with: , , , ,
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