Category: Blogs

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Why Venting on Your Blog Doesn’t Work Positively For You

I read an interesting blog this past week and winced when I read it. I would imagine that a junior staffer wrote it and if the president of the company saw it, it would be taken down immediately.

The blog post was a rant about why an unnamed competitor was stealing this firm’s thunder and online juice. The blog post details seven points that the writer was upset about from bidding on their firms name in AdWords, copying service offerings, imitating content, and blog post commenting with links back to their own website.

The title caught my eye, but when I read the blog post I thought “ouch, this rant should have been filtered”. When you rant on your own blog about a competitor or situation especially when you don’t name names (and you should not), you come off sounding like a whiner and a bad sport.

Yes, pretty sucky things can really happen in the world of business, but you don’t have to blog about them and take a black eye in the process. I recommend that sensitive and negative issues unless done as a case study in a thought provoking objective way be off topic for blogs. You may end up doing more damage to your own online reputation than you would think making your competitor howl for glee.

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A Case Study on Using India to Create Your Website

I found this recent situation interesting and wanted to share it with you. A past blogging client told me that his SEO firm advised him that his website had been nailed with the Google Panda update and they could no longer help him. It turns out that when his website was built by a team in India that they simply grabbed content from other websites out on the web and pasted it into his pages.

When I ran CopyScape on a few of his products, I found many sites that had the same content. This kind of situation is not easy to fix. It will require time and money to buy new unique content. Although not every Indian web service firm will do this to you, if you are using an Indian firm learn from this lesson and assure and then verify that the content you have bought will do you good and not harm. The key is to trust but verify!

This client now has a 1,300 page nightmare to fix that may take thousands of dollars to fix the problem. He may be forced into promoting his website only using Google AdWords as there will be no way to ever garner organic placement in this new world of Google.

Placement on Google is based on the criteria that Google decides, you can’t buy it, but you can earn it by not taking short cuts and focusing on unique content and creating value for readers.

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Great Tips on Blog Writing

Here are a few of my top tips on blog writing to consider.

  1. Stay true to your key topic; meaning don’t skip around and try to write on everything that crosses your mind. Try to create authority and frequency on a few key items that you want to place on organically.
  2. Be consistent. Publish the same days and same time. Don’t miss your schedule! Write ahead and schedule posts if this works best for your needs.
  3. Hire a blog writer and then just add a paragraph at the end of each blog post to personalize the blog for your market.
  4. Try to use keywords that are important to you in the blog post title.
  5. Make sure to use tags and categories smartly and judiciously. Use categories for navigation and tags for keywords.

You don’t need to be an expert writer to write for your own blog, but it does help if you get your message out in a helpful, friendly, and grammatically correct way.

If you need help with your blog, make sure to check out our blog writing services page.

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What’s Worth the Trouble for Social Media?

For every client and business it will be different. For some it is Google+, others Facebook, others yet Twitter, and for some it is definitely LinkedIn. Much of where you should invest your time for social media is about your target audience.

If you are:

  • Consumer oriented – Facebook and Twitter are best
  • Selling mainly to executives and decision makers – LinkedIn is best
  • Selling nationally business to business or business to consumer – I like Twitter

Where you post and invest your time is based on your target market. Where ever you decide to participate, make sure you are still blogging. Activity on social media networks is not a replacement for blogging, but should be considered a supplement to blogging.

Why blogging?

  1. Blog posts are considered as if they are new pages on content.
  2. Blog posts build web authority for your website.
  3. Blog posts create interesting and new content for readers and search engine robots.

Remember…

Blogging is best done when it is on-domain versus at Blogspot.com or WordPress.com. You can feed your blog posts to Twitter and your Facebook wall and use a widget to show your blog posts to readers on LinkedIn. Blogging is about building your domain’s content. Social Media is off-domain and is about connecting with the wider web and sharing links to point to your website, social sites, and drive traffic to your website.