Dude, Blog Your Business!

 
Picture from bloggingfornoobs

One thing I hear time and again from experienced bloggers is that they all learned from their mistakes.  The advice they give to new bloggers is that you shouldn’t worry too much about getting everything perfect before posting on your blog, or even starting a blog.  The best think is to just get in there and do it.

A great way to get the feel of blogging before committing yourself to your own blog is to comment on other people’s blogs.  This will give you some valuable experience and will give you the chance to see whether you like it or not.  Blogging is something you have to do on a regular basis so you want to know before you start whether or not it is for you.

Just remember, even the expert bloggers didn’t always get it right when they started.  I saw this post on Social Median today and thought it worth sharing with you – “15 Things I Wish I Had Known When I Started My First Blog” by Neil Patel.  Neil talks about some of the major things that you need to know about blogging, including the importance of picking a niche, being passionate, blogger ‘burnout’, having a unique design, responding to commentators, picking the right platform and so on.

If you are a business or non-profit contemplating a move into blogs and social media then this article will give you some valuable insights into what you are getting yourself into! And hopefully, steering you away from some early blogging mistakes. Enjoy.

Dave and I always stress the importance of using images in blogs, both for drawing in the visitor to read the post, and for SEO reasons.  (The image above was one I used for our Invest in Energy Blog client today). An interesting point came up in conversation the other day about the increasing use of hand-held devices such as PDAs and cell phones for accessing websites and blogs on the move.  It was stressed that images in blog posts can be annoying when trying to read them on such devices because the image files can be quite large and take a long time to download. And on a small screen you cannot see them that well anyway.

This is an interesting point and certainly something that blog owners increasingly need to consider.  While I would reiterate the importance of using images in blog posts, the blogger can make life easier for readers on all platforms by scaling and optimizing their images for quick download.  This is especially important if you are taking your own digital pictures for your blog (recommended).  These often come out at approximately  2000 pixels in size, with a file size somewhere around 2.5 Mb – that’s huge for the web.

Ideally, you need to scale the picture down to around 500 pixels wide and optimize the file size to around 100 – 150 Kb or so.   This is especially important for bloggers using developer-hosted blogs because free space on those is limited to around 3Mb – after that you pay a monthly fee.  Optimizing images is always good practice for anything on the web, even if just as a courtesy to your readers. If the software that comes with your digital camera isn’t completely up to the job – mine certainly isn’t – then something like Photoline has all the functionality you will ever need for only 59 Euros.

 
I was delighted to hear from Darren Stevenson of Darren Stevenson Photography LLC following a comment I placed in answer to a question on LinkedIn. Darren asked me to take a look at his blog - www.poppa-d.blogspot.com/ and let him know if there were any improvements I could suggest.

I have to say that, overall, Darren was very much along the right tracks with his blog. The one big plus that is often absent in a lot of blogs is that he has great images in both the sidebar and with every post. Being a photographer he is fortunate to have access to an unlimited number of his own images and, of course, images are a vital part of using his blog to market his photography business.

Probably the one single greatest bit of advice I could give him was that he could make far more of the SEO opportunities with his images. Dave and I have written about this in other posts – just click on the “Blogging Advice” link in the category menu, or “SEO” in the Tag cloud if you want to read the post – but suffice it to say images are a vital part of SEO in blogs – everyone needs to use them.

One of the things Darren had very much got right with his blog is the establishing of himself firmly within the context of the area (Arizona) where his business was located – what we like to call ‘geo-targeting’. If your business is firmly tied to a specific geographical area it is very important that visitors (potential clients), get a sense of you as a ‘local’ businessperson. In order to achieve that you need to talk/post about your activities within that context.

Blogging is a very powerful medium and a little knowledge can make an incredible difference to how successful your business blog is in terms of online marketing. That is what we are here for.

I had an interesting conversation with my brother on Christmas Day. He has a Landscape Architecture practice in Britain and had just paid several thousand dollars to have his web site brought up to date. It is a good web site [www.jba-landmarc.com - have a free backlink bro!], but his problem now is that every time he wants to make a minor update to the site he has to pay the web design company to do it – they have, apparently, patented software to design sites which prevents someone else from editing the site – yeah right!

Unfortunately, we hear far too often of such things when it comes to websites. That is just another positive reason to get a blog rather than a website. Blog posts, and even static HTML pages that can be created in a blog, are easily written and updated by the blog owner. He doesn’t need to know HTML, asp, php and all the other things web sites require these days. The blog owner merely uses what is, in effect, a cut down word processor. If you can use MS Word then you can easily write your own blog posts. Even adding pictures and video is a piece of cake.

So, let us empower you with your own customized, high-end blog and we’ll teach everything you need to know to quickly, easily and cheaply manage it yourself – this is the cutting edge of online and social media marketing. Instead of having to pay to update a ‘News’ page on his website my brother is now planning to get a blog and update it himself for free!