Teach Yourself Social Media Marketing

Posted on May 18, 2012 by Mary

Taking the time to learn a new skill that can later bring in much happiness is a great use of your time. One of those skills is Social Media. When people are looking for ways to learn how to market their business, social media marketing is a surefire way to get people to come to your website. The surefire way today, that is. Technology is constantly changing so tomorrow there will be a new way to do things but it’s important to be in the now when you are trying to market your services or products. As a small business owner, you probably don’t have the money to go out and hire a marketing specialist to do your social media. It’ll cost you want to spend a pretty penny.

To avoid paying somebody to do your social media, you need to be able to teach yourself a thing or two about the latest “cool” thing. That’s where the people are and that’s how to reach your customers. One of the newest things lately as of May, 2012 is the ability to link your Facebook page to your twitter account and vice versa. It’s probably been out for a while but the idea is appealing because not everybody has twitter. You would want your tweets to reach as many people as possible and with this new tool you are able to do just that. Suppose you’re just starting out and have no idea how to do anything the first thing you should do is create a Facebook page.

With Facebook, your potential marketing reach is incredible. The amount of people that are out there is in the millions. It would’ve cost a lot of money back in the 90’s to reach that many people but today it costs nothing. Take the time to get to know what you are doing and look at the different examples of Facebook pages out there. Learn more about the options you have with your page and don’t cut corners. The Internet is a vast space full of knowledge.

Social media is constantly expanding and changing which means you have new toys to play with all the time. Learn what works for your website and avoid what doesn’t. Not every resource out there is made for the niche you’re focused on. When you think niche, you should be thinking business-to-business or business-to-consumer.  Don’t fool yourself, learn what your target audience is and find where they are before throwing yourself into learning a specific social media tool. Time is money, you don’t want to be throwing away money so don’t throw away time.

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Blogging About Holidays

Posted on May 13, 2012 by Mary

When you are working within a specific niche, often holidays are overlooked and perceived as unimportant. If you are able to incorporate holidays within your blogging, it reminds everybody reading your blog that you are an actual person. Companies that do not acknowledge holidays can be perceived as inhumane. Not necessarily to the extreme end of the spectrum. It’s not pleasant to be involved with a group of people that don’t care about anything outside the meeting room. In order to be able to include holidays within your blog, you need to find a way to smoothly include it.

For example, today is Mother’s Day and instead of writing about another topic, the writer of this blog has chosen to include information about how to be able to blog about holidays. It’s not an awfully important thing to do for a lot of people but it’s necessary. Another way that this blog could’ve included Mother’s Day is to interview the blogger’s mother about her writing suggestions. It’s a great way to honor your mother and at the same time keep the niche going through the posts. Now, lets look at blogging about other things like maybe pets. Your pet is a mother too if it’s a female and has given birth or “adopted” another pet as their own. Talking about how a dog mothers their puppies is a great way to incorporate mother’s day in the blog.

Blogging about Mother’s Day isn’t the only kind of holiday you would want to include. If you’re including 4th of July or Easter, taking pictures of pets with their costumes for those holidays would be great! Now, if there’s a blog about something harder to incorporate holidays in, a note would suffice. It’s not entirely necessary to write a whole blog post wrapped around the holiday. You could begin with: We’d like to wish everybody a great Mother’s Day! You could also do something else like: On mother’s day, we have discovered….

It’s not hard to do but often not something that companies find important to do. There is always the possibility of incorporating holidays while blogging. With that in mind, remember today’s Mother’s Day and hopefully you’ve been able to say Happy Mother’s Day to the important Mothers in your life!

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Blog Appearance is Equally Important to Content

Posted on May 12, 2012 by Mary

You could write a whole book of great content and have zero repeat visitors. People want to look at something appealing which is why your blog appearance is just as important as your web content. It’s not about creating a fancy website but making one that people like to look at. Many writers forget to add color or pictures to their blog. Not only do pictures add appeal, they also create another way for people to connect to your blog. With all of the new social media sites out there, you want to be sure to maximize the ways you can bring traffic to your site.

With Pinterest, linking pictures of things you did and an article you wrote related to that item, you’re able to attach a photograph. With that added into the equation for social media, you’re in luck. If you aren’t able to add pictures, be sure that your website speaks for itself. Sometimes customers will look around a website and determine they don’t want to purchase from that site because of the appearance. With that said, the appearance of your blog is just as important as your web content.

It’s not to say that your blog appearance must be fancy or something beyond your abilities. Be sure to look at all the options you have out there for a blog software program. One example would be word press. Clearly this example, everybody has heard of but they’ve thought about how it’s only for blogs. That’s actually quite the opposite. While it’s very commonly used as a blog platform, people use it for their websites as well! It’s actually a content management system. With a content management system, your blog appearance is so much easier to complicate than if you were trying to develop your site from scratch with HTML, CSS, and so forth.

There are writers out there that don’t want to have to deal with that, they’d rather focus on the writing part and let somebody else do the complicated prettiness of the site. Create great content, use a CMS to create your blog appearance and your blog might win some awards!  Don’t worry too much about the awards yet, just make your blog appearance appealing to your audience and you’ll be well on your way to a successful blog.

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Balancing Multiple Blogs and Diversifying Your Writing

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Mary

If you’re thinking about writing multiple blogs, decide if it’s necessary to write different blogs for different topics. When a professional writer is asked to write multiple blogs, they know that keeping their schedule straight is a very important aspect of being successful. Another necessity is to learn more about a larger variety of topics. This means when you post in each blog with their catered focus, be sure that the information you’re sharing is not shared as factual and if you based on experience, be sure it’s obvious.

One of the biggest advantages of working on multiple blogs is that your brain absorbs so much more and you’re going to learn a lot more than if you were writing for a single blog. While this might be appealing to some people, others will think it’s too much work. Writing multiple blogs takes a lot of time and commitment especially if you’re going to be writing more than two. Learning more not only benefits both blogs, you are also learning about things you would have put off learning.

Not only are you diversifying your topics, sometimes you have the chance of writing different kinds of documentations. Some blogs focus on restaurant reviews and others require additional information, which means you have to write white papers or articles. Writing articles or reviews, you still learn more about the variety in requirement. Not every kind of document is approached the same and their focus tends to be different. With that chance, your writing portfolio becomes much more diversified. It’s a great addition and when you use the blogs to showcase your work, you’re also creating a online portfolio.

The main thing you need to remember is to focus on creation of each blog individually and not forgetting to separate them. Don’t forget your schedule and remember that sometimes the best plan is to do things ahead of time. If you are able to write your posts ahead of time, you can create better posts. You will also have a solid posting record. Don’t sacrifice quality to write multiple blogs. A word of wisdom, if you want to have multiple blogs just for the heck of it: be sure your first blog is top of the line and attracting good traffic. When you have a strong blogging history, you can support more than one blog but if you don’t, not a good idea.

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Blog Post Interval to be Determined

Posted on May 5, 2012 by Mary

Creating a blog requires some decisions that most people don’t realize are critical for success. The biggest focus right at the beginning of creation should be how frequent you want to post in your blog. While the frequency of posts is one of many important aspects, it can and will make or break traffic. People that subscribe to blogs want to get constant and regular information. It doesn’t matter how often or how little you create a new blog post, people want to know when to expect something. Some bloggers write their posts ahead of time and set up scheduled posts and others prefer to write right when they want to post something.

There’s no right or wrong answer on when to write your posts or how often you should write but the most important thing is to create new content. Sometimes creating a large bulk to go up as quickly as possible and then creating a regular posting schedule is what people do at the beginning of their blog creation. Others just let it grow as time goes by. Posting a blog post in regular intervals is necessary and it’s okay to change but try to leave something the same. One example would be to create blog posts that are put up every Friday. Later you might decide to add Tuesdays and then Thursdays but then if you do that and decide to drop something later, keep Fridays because people know you have been posting every Friday since day one.

Another thing to keep in mind is to not bite off more than you can chew. It might be exciting to be posting once a week but if your schedule does not allow that to occur, set it up for once every two weeks or once a month. Keep in mind what you can commit to and go from there. There is no obligation to create a schedule. There should be a minimum that you follow and sometimes when you over-do it, your motivation will be shot early in the project. As a blogger, you will find that having a set time that you sit down either once a week or once a month to create blog posts ahead of time will help. Based on some issues bloggers experience, learn your area of focus and educate your readers of new things.

It could be that you are writing about plants and you got a new plant today. How awfully exciting! Now, you need to create a post about that particular plant because now you’re learning about it. You might already be an expert at gardening but you are now adding in new products in your knowledge base. Share with your audience as you learn and you’ll find that you learn much faster. If you’ve set a blog post for once a week, you could create your post for this week or next about the plant! Brainstorming is already over and you’re well ahead of your game. If you have already created your post for this week and you have a lot of other ideas for next week, go ahead and post a second blog post. There is nothing wrong with adding more information but be aware, if you do that frequently enough, your readers will expect more frequent updates.

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Optimization for Your Website

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Mary

Creating a website is not just putting pretty pictures and writing words, it requires some kind of planning and optimization. Optimizing your website and doing it right is necessary. When you optimize for the wrong things, you are not bringing the correct traffic to your site and wasting time/money. They’re not going to be pleased that they couldn’t find what they wanted. Optimizing your website correctly requires some keyword research. When doing keyword research, sometimes it’s better to use other sites that do the same thing you do.

Look at their website and figure out what kind of keywords they use to optimize their site. A great example would be a dentist office using keywords such as teeth, teeth cleaning, hygienic skills, and so forth. Those are the first keywords that come up when thinking of a dentist. When a dentist decides to write a blog about oral health, it’s very important that they choose the correct keywords to focus on. Keyword density is another thing to pay attention to. It is very bad to write your keyword many times around. With Google’s constant change in their algorithms, they are finding ways to filter out sites that do not follow their rules.

If your site were to be found guilty of over-optimization or spam, it’s very possible you will lose ranking or be blocked. The idea is terrible but it’s something to be aware of! As your experience in using keywords increase, the better you will be at driving the right traffic to your site through optimization. With that in mind, keyword optimization is not only good for your blog, articles and so forth. It’s very important that your main keywords that describe or define your website are used throughout your web content.

Sometimes when you write your content, remembering what kind of keywords to use helps you write better content too. There’s one big no-no. Do not ever write nonsense just to throw in keywords. That is the worst thing you can do because then people are not going to come back. The whole point in optimizing your website is to lead to repeat traffic. When a person finds your site and you are able to offer what they need, they stay. It’s as simple as that but as complicated as that.

Don’t worry too much about keyword optimization. Write your content focused on your company and you might find that you’re naturally using the words that need to be used.

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Posting Predetermined Incremental Blog Posts

Posted on May 2, 2012 by Mary

Blogging is not an exact science and creating blogs is all about determining what you want to write about. Some people enjoy writing about clothes while others like talking about decorating. Not every blog is the same so remembering that is important when you try to figure out what niche you wants your blog to follow. People are looking for fun blogs to read and educational. Don’t spend all your time researching and forgetting to write. Create a schedule and stick with it. If it’s hard to follow a schedule, sit down and write several posts ahead of time and set them to release in predetermined increments.

It’s also a smart thing to release time-sensitive information first and then information that is not based on the date can be released later. Nothing is worse than writing an update about decorating for Halloween and having it released closer to Thanksgiving. It’d be a great idea to write about Halloween in July but then what if trends change. Blogging is not only about the niche you are writing about but staying on top of things.

Even with passion for blogging, you would be surprised how much happens in life and how happy you would be having pre-released blog posts. Now you are able to relax a little bit without worrying about writing something in time for tomorrow. If you do end up writing something you can always choose which post you prefer to have released on which date.

That’s the beauty of having a blog that enables you to schedule posts. With the ability to schedule posts, you can write for months at a time and then have no passion but your blog is still going. With that kind of passion, you could probably create blog posts up to a year ahead. Some people are that extreme but others would prefer not to hold off that long.

With 52 weeks a year and only 2 posts a week, you would only have to write 104 posts to have your blog posts a year ahead. The problem with doing that is, things change and with social media, nothing is guaranteed. If you write a post about tweeting your blog posts and release it at this time next year and twitter is no longer around. People are going to think you have gone nuts. However there are topics that have not changed for years so it’d be safe to release those a year later.

If you do decide to do something like that, it’s highly recommended to look at your work before they are released. Don’t let your blog die down, that’s when traffic dies down.

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Being Successful is not Measured by Others

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Mary

Working hard, forgetting to play can also corrupt your wants and needs. When your life becomes so incorporated with desire and greed, you forget to love yourself. Finding a center again is a very important part of being a successful person. Success can’t be measured in money or wealth; it can only be measured in sense. When you are measuring sense, you are measuring your intuition. Don’t worry too much about what other people think because you’re the one that has to live with it. Your life is only complete after you die and when you die, you die alone.

It’s not that you are going to physically die alone but you are going to pass onto the next stage by yourself regardless of how many people are next to you when you die. That is why you need to feel like you have been successful with your life. Finding your way can seem like such a hard task but the most important thing is to sit with yourself and look inside. Decide what is worth it and what isn’t. Don’t let anybody else define what you want to do with your life. If you’ve found somebody that wants to tell you that your definition of being successful isn’t right, don’t let him or her be part of your life. It can only throw off your center. Having your center thrown off can really corrupt the path you are supposed to go on.

Being successful is not about being on a pre-designated path. It’s more about feeling centered and connected constantly. That is what each and every person needs to be able to do and nobody has the right to take that away from you. Re-center yourself, find peace, and push forward with your plans. That could be a great piece of advice for anybody. People that have so much going on in their lives don’t take a moment for themselves. When they near the end of any given journey, they can’t help but feel alone. Don’t feel bad alone; find the courage to feel at peace and be okay alone. Being alone is not something that should be frightful; it should be serene and peaceful. Being lonely is not a good feeling and not something that should be confused with being alone. Be successful and feel good about it!

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Using Blog Posts to Educate your Readers

Posted on April 30, 2012 by Mary

While some people write blog posts to talk about personal things such as their day or how things are going, those blogs will only attract people that want to hear about their day. If they choose to talk about their day but incorporate information that’s interesting then more people will want to come back. Some of the best blogs out there have talked specifically about their lives but incorporate so much information about things that people want to know about such as: gardening, farming, knitting, decorating, and so forth. Attracting people to your blog is just like attracting mosquitos.

Put out something out with a scent that is irresistible to mosquitos but then once they’re in, they can’t get out! If you think that’s a bad metaphor, just wait and see what other ones are around here on this blog! The point being, you need to think about what kind of posts you want to create. After that, create posts that add in knowledge and education for your readers. It’s not a difficult thing to do but requires a bit of research. You don’t want to be known as the blogger that posts misleading information. It’s not a good thing to have on your track record.

Sometimes it takes creating blog posts for other people in order for you to understand how to simulate your reader. Creating different keywords prior to writing your posts will also enable you to incorporate search engine optimization without being annoying. That’s why it’s important to include keywords in every aspect of your blog post including the title and body. Don’t fret if you haven’t been doing that, start now and you’ll see a change in your traffic. There’s no point in creating great posts and not having a way for your readers to subscribe to your posts. That’s something that some bloggers forget to do. Keep your blog posts between 300 and 500 words because not a lot of people can tolerate reading long posts.

If you catch yourself wanting to write significantly longer than 500 words in your post, split it up in two and see if that helps. Not only would you have two posts that will be optimized, you will also give your readers a reason to come back. It works in both of your favor. Take advantage of your blog posts and attract your readers with great information, interesting content, and a personal connection if possible.

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Search Engine Optimization Changes Blogger Perspectives

Posted on April 29, 2012 by Mary

As a blogger, you probably are faced with many different struggles including learning how not to write in first person. It’s a big mistake that a lot of people make when they first create their first blog. As the projects become more keyword-geared, they learn more about search engine optimization and how to maximize visitors. It’s not about getting enough visitors to your blog site but more about using the correct keywords to describe what your topic is about. For example, when you are reading this, you might think that blogger would be the keyword but it’s not. It’s search engine optimization. The reason why this blog post would be focused on that keyword is because that is what bloggers need to learn about.

Not only do you learn about keywords but how to place them. It’s very important, especially when writing for search engine placement; you don’t want to overdo that particular keyword. Learning how to do that correctly only takes a few attempts. Blogging is an art and a science. It’s a way to attract customers to your site and figure out what they want to know. It’s not always about giving them what they want to know but a wide enough spectrum of information that they will want to come back and learn more about what you have to offer. It’s a very interesting thing to learn about and as time goes by, it becomes easier. Look at the keyword you want to learn more about and figure out if that particular keyword is in high demand. If it’s in high demand and low competition it’s a great keyword to maximize search engine optimization within your blog.

You are able to attract more potential customer and create a better atmosphere within your blog. Bringing the right kind of people into your blog is actually the most important thing because you don’t want to get a high bounce rate when determining measurement of traffic. It’s not easy to figure that out but as you learn more about how to do search engine optimization adequately, it becomes easier. There is no specific way to do things correctly but as you learn more, your ability to attract the correct customers will become easier. The idea is time consuming and exhausting but as search engine optimization becomes a part of your blog, it becomes easier. Another thing to notice is when you are writing a blog post about something; include the keyword in the description and your title.

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