Category: Blogs

I just had a client call me about their blogging services being done by another firm and he mentioned that the blogger was doing social network blogging and what did I think about that. The client is in a high tech market and the topics of the posts were things like: Little Norrie, Corrie, A New Car For Graduation, Daddie Finds a New Love. Good grief who was writing these posts a high schooler?

Blogging for business is just that serious business. Readers on a business blog want to read blog posts that speak to their interest and reason for visiting in the first place. Blogging is not about attracting the MySpace generation who doesn’t have money to pay for the products that are used by fleets and courier services in this case.

My rule of thumb has been that business blogging should be on topic for the industry, be written in an engaging style, offer a reason for people to subscribe or visit again, and build authority on the product or service for the client for Google and other search engines.

Blogging is serious business! By the way, we got the job and the client fired their social networking blogger.

Here’s our short list of errors and common mistakes that blog owners make. Take a quick look to make sure that you are part of the “club”.

1. Forgot to integrate the blog site into the main website. You can’t get cross site traffic if you don’t link! Make it easy for website visitors to read your blog and make it easy for blog visitors to find out more about you.

2. Don’t forget to add the one click easy subscribe chicklets. You know the little icons that say “Add to My Yahoo” or “Add to My Google”. Many blog readers do not understand the world of XML or RSS news feeds or even that the news portal that they are already using is feed enabled. Make it easy with a one click solution.

3. Make sure to add a Feedburner “get posts by email”. This is the same issue as above, to syndicate your content and get readers, you need to make it easy. Some people want to get posts the old way by email. Feedburner makes it easy by setting up a subscription service that allows your reader to get your posts in their email box complete with pictures. It is very easy to use and another way that you can encourage regular readership.

4. Keep your posts on topic! Keep your readers interested by offering something helpful or newsworthy based on your industry. People do not go to a GPS blog to read about teen angst or about their Daddy buying them a car! Social blogging should stay in the social arena on forums and on personal websites, these type of posts simply do not have a place in the professional business blog.

Well now I have seen it all. I have a client for whom we do ghost blogging and he sent me a note yesterday asking if we could host his blog. It appears that his current blog host had charged $1,500 for blog set up, owned his domain name and blog template, and was charging a whopping $500 a month maintenance fee. On top of that he paid us ghost blogging charges.

It just does not have to cost this much to blog! Hosting for a WordPress blog with auto-publish features and full SEO fields (which I like very much) can be had for $3.39 a month at Go Daddy, blog set up and configuration with a nice free WordPress template can be done for under $199, and you can buy your domain name when you set up hosting with Go Daddy and even own it yourself for $1.99. Scary isn’t it the difference!

To be 100% truthful his original blog allowed new authors to create their own blog, but only two people on his blog was using that the rest were just publishing to the main blog. We have been able to set up a plain vanilla WordPress blog at the prices above and allow all of his previous authors to continue to write and categorize their blogs by their business name for easy navigation to their posts.

Blogging and blog set up simply does not have to be expensive and maintenance should never cost this much. If you are paying this much for YOUR blog, you need to contact us to find out how we can save you money and still get the search engine benefits you want.

Blogger has problems with publishing when you have a lot of labels on your blog. In fact if you have more than 30 or so labels, get ready to pull your hair out or have over an hour to publish your posts or even have inconsistent publishing.

I have found from personal experience that it is better to use your labels for top keywords and as blog navigation. Just don’t get in the habit of creating a new label for every post. Routinely we keep our bloggers set with about 10 to 20 keywords and ask them to post to these labels only for their blog posts.

One this keeps blogger from getting label bloated and keeps publishing snappy. The other thing is that by assigning labels for your bloggers you control the focus of the posts for search engine optimization.

As labels are also used for additional content navigation, we also recommend that on every blog a search engine function to be installed so that visitors can review content in an easier fashion. It seems that you could do this with Blogger labels, but once you have a bloated blog and sit for hours for publishing you will understand the wisdom of controlling the number of labels on your blog.