Business Blogging

Archive for January, 2010

Sometimes the best marketing strategy is to give readers tips for how to chose the right service provider.  Your tips should include things to look for, ask for or ways to negotiate better deals.  In reality, your motivation is to highlight how much service “you” provide as compared to your competition: however,  you are not allowed to talk about yourself.

A tips and Tricks article does not follow the business blogging outline (i.e. state a thesis, support the idea, etc.), but instead your tip article will give several micro statements in the form of instructions.  For example, let’s assume you are writing some tips on how to buy the right kitchen appliance.  Your article might be phrases as such:

Don’t ask the appliance sales guy which washer he likes best, ask him to show you the consumer reports write up on three of his best washers.  Take note of his reaction, those who use pressure based sales techniques will commit to asking his boss for the reports while showing you his top seller.  The company who believes in service will have those reports with him, or in very close proximity.

Article length should around 300 words and be broken up into no more than five or six paragraphs.  The idea is to brings visitors to your web site based on micro-chunks of knowledge.  If your article is too long, reading it will feel daunting.

Limit the number of tips you write to three or four at most.  Too many tips and your keyword performance will suffer.

Using our example above, you don’t need to highlight your companies focus on providing consumer reports to anyone who asks, it is implied in the fact that you wrote the tip.

Happy Blogging

Graphical Perfection versus Content

I am often asked how a NON-graphic artist can develop effective websites.  The answer is simple, I focus 90% of the effort on the website content and only 10% on the look of the site.  Looks do have an order of importance, don’t get me wrong.  Your website should look modern and fresh, but Google cares most about content.  The short and skinny is, if Google doesn’t like your content then noone will EVER visit your website.

On the internet today, your focus should be spent providing single topic focused content on a regular basis (i.e. new information every week).  Your website should be designed to present information in both date order as well as categorized navigation.

Your blog page doesn’t have to be for diary type information!

The term blog refers to the type of technology driving the site (i.e. date and category drive organization).  Your web site should organize information using a mix of static pages and dynamic blog postings.

A static page is defined as information that is only available via the page navigation menu system.  Pull down menus, on-site links, and sidebar menus are the most common method of guiding users to this information.

Dynamic blog postings are defined as information that is available via a menu structure by page title, post date and category.

Happy Blogging

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