A frequently heard complaint from entrepreneurs who start blogging is: “Why isn’t my blog working for my business?”

Blogs that work well for attracting new clients have these key elements:

1. A great blog name
2. A tag line or blog purpose statement
3. An easy way to get automatic blog updates
4. A list of categories
5. A list of recent posts and recent comments
6. Links to useful websites, products and services
7. Frequent posts with links relevant to the blog’s purpose
8. An easy way for readers to have a conversation with the author

What’s in a good blog name?

A good blog name must say what your blog is about. Ideally, the name lets the reader know whom the blog is for, and the focus of your topic. It is also compelling – it makes you hungry to dive in and start reading.

It’s can be difficult to create a great name. Plus, you probably want the title to be clever. Never sacrifice clarity when trying to be clever. The name is important for search engines, so it should use keywords readers use when searching for products and services in your niche.

But, wait! As long as we’re creating the ideal blog name, there’s more. It should also connect with your company name and contribute to your branding.

Don’t get discouraged. You’ve probably already formulated a title for your business or website that meets some of these requirements. In many cases, you can simply name your blog the same as your website, and tack “blog” or “online” at the end of it.

(If you have a blog platform that resides on your website you don’t have to worry about naming your blog as much because it will have the same name as your website and will simply be a page on the site.)

Finding a name for your blog depends on the availability of that name as a domain URL. Search for your ideal blog name using a domain registrar, such as GoDaddy. You will want to “map” your registered blog name URL over the URL your blog provider created when you set up your blog. For branding purposes you don’t want to have “typepad” or “blogspot” in your domain URL.

Next, tell readers who your blog is for and “what’s in it for them.” On some blogging platforms, this is done in the header, after the title and is called a tag line. The tag line states the benefits for readers, the readers you are targeting, as well as the blog author’s name (you).

Sooner or later, customers go online to find out more about your business and your reputation. What do they find when they search for your name, or your company? How visible are you?

It’s no secret that successful business owners and professionals can now have a strong Internet presence with little cost and without hiring tech staff.

So what do your potential clients find when they “Google” you? Have you checked lately?

Hopefully they find more than a static brochure-style website full of industry jargon, company kudos, and marketing hype.

Think about it in terms of what prospects really want to find out when they research you and your company… Here’s a big clue: what they want to know is: can they trust you?

No hype, no fluff, no dry lists of achievements. Your prospects want to learn more about you, and the people who are part of your organization. And yes, it would be nice if you put a little personality into your web presence. How else do you think they will begin to trust you?

People do business with people, not with companies. On the Internet, all you’ve got are words, design, and your brand. Your brand is more than your logo. It communicates your core message and implies your values.

The Internet is easy, user-friendly, cheap, and effective for getting your business found by the people who need your products and services. But not everyone is smart about building the trust they need with people searching for their services on the Web. Here are four paths toward creating a strong web presence to get found, get clients, and get massive visibility.

4 Paths to Create Massive Visibility

The truth is, it’s not about having a website anymore, is it? No, you can’t get massive visibility online with just a website.

You need a website and a blog, of course. All Internet marketing gurus will insist: you must write and publish a blog. And, they’ll tell you, you must write frequently on your blog, at least 3-4 times a week to generate search engine traffic.

But, you need more than that. You need the following elements in order to get massive visibility and gain the trust of readers in your niche:

1. A business blog (where you communicate in a conversational tone)

 

2. A brand (where you use design to help people to remember you)

 

3. Valuable, relevant content (to educate and engage with readers)

 

4. Participation in Social Networking sites (where you become easily accessible)

All four elements are necessary, and like the song goes, “You can’t have one without the other.”

Becoming massively visible on the Web means more than just a website and a blog. You now have the opportunity to be “everywhere.”

You must be prolific with publishing content, consistent with your branding and accessible in social networking sites if you want to leverage the Internet and create massive visibility.

9 out of 10 professionals and small business owners have at least one book or information product inside their head, but lack the time and organizational skills to get it out into digital or print form.

You may cringe when you read this list of ten things keeping you from writing your book, because it rings too close to home for you. You may have already written a book or an e-book, or have come close to starting it. It’s hard, we know it, and we’ve been there too. But go ahead and read this list, see if you can identify, and let’s discuss a possible solution to the book writing problem.

1. I can’t seem to find the time.

2. Every time I sit down to write I go blank.

3. I need an uninterrupted time period to immerse myself.

4. I need clarity on my message, but there’s no one to consult with.

5. I don’t know where to start or how to organize all the chapters.

6. I’m afraid of losing clients and having my business suffer if I take time away from it to write my book.

7. I agonize over the writing, the grammar, the sentence structure and punctuation.

8. I know what I have to say, just can’t put it into written form without losing clarity and impact.

9. I keep thinking about all the time involved in writing the book, and wonder if it will ever bring me the results I want.

10. Once I get it written, I have no idea how to get it formatted, let alone marketed.

Ok, you know why you haven’t started writing your book. Do you know why you need to write a book?

Why You Need to Publish a Book

Here are a few reasons why writing and publishing a book is important to you as an independent professional, small business owner, or solo-preneur:

1. Having a book, whether in digital, soft-cover, or hard-cover establishes you as an expert in your field.

2. People buy from people they know and trust; reading your book is one step in creating client confidence and relationship.

3. Once people buy and read your book, they will want more of what you have to offer in the way of services and knowledge. Your book can attract readers into your sphere of potential clients; once they have bought your book, they are ready to buy other services from you.

4. Having a published book is a great marketing tool, and people will actually pay for your expertise.

5. Books are one of the major sources of passive income for professionals; once it is published it can continue to generate sales for you, over the years and while you sleep.

6. If you don’t get a book out soon, your competitors will have the edge, because many of them already have one and even two books out.

7. If you are a speaker, they make great bonus gifts and back-of-the-room sales.

8. They provide a platform for you to expose your readers to your mind and your heart, showing not only what you know, but how much you care. You can reveal your deepest philosophies through your writing, as well as your personal stories.

Three Solutions to the Book-Writing Problem

Of course, there is no problem if you’ve got a lot of money. You just hire a book writer. There are many of them listed at Elance.com. Some professionals do this, especially when they need to get something published fast and there are not a lot of complex issues to put forth. But is this really what you want to do as a professional who has an important message to convey?

Here is a list of solutions:

1. Hire someone to write your book for you (you can always rewrite it in your own voice and add your own stories). When finished, hire a publisher and then a publicist to market it.

2. Hire a writing coach who will walk you through the steps, chapter by chapter (again, for a substantial fee). Then when finished, hire a publisher and a publicist.

3. Bite the bullet, put your business on hold for a few months, and devote your time to just getting it written. You will have to turn it over to a book designer and get it formatted; search for the right publisher such as self-publishing or print-on-demand services, and then market it yourself.

Expensive? Yes, all three solutions are expensive. They each have their advantages and disadvantages.

The Fourth Solution

There is another solution! What if there was a way to help you get your book down in print and ready for formatting in 90 days?

What if you could do this by following a system that organized you chapter by chapter, included testimonials, input from peers, professional editing resources, design and formatting resources at low costs, and only took a half-hour of time per day?

Could you afford to invest that much time and energy out of your busy day? Would it be worth it to you even if it meant an hour a day for 90 days?

If you already have a blog that you use to communicate with readers online, you can use your blog to write your book.

The blog format is perfect for organizing your ideas, chapters and getting feedback from readers.

If you don’t have a blog yet, you may wish to create one. They are simple to set up and use (we recommend Typepad.com). It can be used to stay in touch with clients and to write your thoughts in an informal way. A blog is like having a conversation with people interested in your subject or expertise. Once your book is finished and formatted, you can then use your blog to market it. You already have a built in audience, hungry for your content.

To read more about how this system works and how you can benefit, go to this site: www.blogtobook.com – the way you think about writing your book will shift and you’ll see it in a whole new light!

Blogs are the hottest thing going these days when it comes to marketing on the Internet. A blog is a way of delivering your messages and article to clients. They are a like personal web sites, easy to create and far less expensive than traditional web sites.

Just when you thought you were mastering the tasks of ezines and newsletters, along comes blogging, and you have to ask yourself:

Do I really need a blog?

Isn’t an email ezine or newsletter doing the same thing?

Should I do both?

Are these two marketing tools going to eat up all my time, energy and money?

What’s the best way to spend my resources here so that I can get clients and results out of my marketing efforts?

Here are ten reasons why you should pay attention to this new blogging revolution and do both and ezine and a blog.

1. Because a blog is web based, it is published instantaneously every time you post. This allows you to be spontaneous and current with issues that affect your readers/clients. Blog posts are short, ezines can be longer. One can complement the other.
2. Because blog posts are spontaneous, they tend to be more informal, friendly, and conversational. Blog posts show your personality. Ezines show your knowledge. Your readers/clients need to know who you are before they will invest in your services. Providing both an ezine and a blog allows your readers to get to know you.
3. You can set up a subscription form on your blog and your subscribers will get a short notice in their inboxes each time you post something new. This is a great way around the spam filter problem which blocks so many ezines and legitimate messages from professionals.
4. Blogs link to other blogs and web sites, which helps you create a viral marketing system, increasing your exposure to search engines. Search engines love blogs because they are text based and key word rich. Your rankings go up when you publish a blog and use linking and posting on a frequent basis. You can also link to your own web site(s).
5. You have instant access to all your published articles on your blog. A blog automatically creates archives of previous posts. You see them in a side-bar for easy access. You put them into categories for easy finding. One clever person we know spent a day posting all her EzineArticles to her blog, so that it would appear she has been blogging for a much longer time. Also, readers of her blog may not have had the opportunity to read all of her other ezine articles.
6. You can use your blog to become a trusted expert in your field by filtering content on the web for your subscribers. Readers don’t have time to surf and to collect information, but you can do it for them, thereby establishing yourself as a good resource.
7. You can set up links for ads, products, and for your affiliate programs in the blog side columns so you don’t have to include them in the body of your article. In an ezine, you have to be careful about promotional stuff in the article because it annoys people and causes them to unsubscribe. A blog is a non-intrusive way to do this, and an ezine can link to the blog where more information can be found.
8. Readers can comment on your blog postings, which creates rapport and with readers. You can ask questions, stimulate responses by being controversial, and survey readers. It is a great way to keep your finger on the pulse of what readers want.
9. You don’t have to mess with a web site, or pay a web designer to update your web site every time you have a new article or teleclass, or program or product. Blogs are user-friendly, and with a few instructions or tutorials, you can learn to use it yourself. It is less expensive than setting up your ezine in HTML.
10. Bottom line is this: using a blog and an ezine will help attract more visitors to your website, who become subscribers and who may eventually become clients.

Think of the World Wide Web as a big fishing pond. The more fishing lines in the pond, the more fish you are going to catch!

You have a web site, yet it is static like an online brochure.

You have an ezine, which you grow through subscription links everywhere.

And now, you should have a blog, where you can attract more readers to get to know you, where they can interact with you, and maybe take your bait!

Happy fishing!

You’ve got your blog set up and you’ve started posting pithy, useful information that your niche market would benefit from and enjoy. Days go by, you keep publishing, but no one comments and your traffic stats are barely registering. What do you do?

Like any website you own, you must do some blog promotion to start driving traffic to your site. Here are 16 steps, in no particular order of importance, that you can start doing now to get traffic moving to your blog.

1. Set up a Bloglet subscription form on your blog and invite everyone in your network to subscribe: family, friends, colleagues, clients, associates.

http://www.bloglet.com

2. Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so your site gets regularly spidered by the Yahoo search engine (see tutorial on http://www.biztipsblog.com)

http://www.my.yahoo.com

3. Read and comment on other blogs that are in your target niche. Don’t write things like “nice blog” or “great post.” Write intelligent, useful comments with a link to your blog.

4. Use Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. Do this every time you publish.

http://www.pingomatic.com

5. Submit your blog to traditional search engines:

http://www.submitfire.com

6. Submit your blog to blog directories. The most comprehensive list of directories is on this site:

http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/

Tip: Create a form to track your submissions; this can take several hours when you first start so schedule an hour a day for submitting or hire a VA to do it for you.

7. Add a link to your blog in your email signature file.

8. Put a link to your blog on every page of your website.

9. If you publish a newsletter, make sure you have a link to your blog in every issue.

10. Include a link to your blog as a standard part of all outgoing correspondence such as autoresponder sequences, sales letters, reports, white papers, etc.

11. Print your blog URL on your business cards, brochures and flyers.

12. Make sure you have an RSS feed URL that people can subscribe to.
The acronym RSS means Rich Site Summary, or some may consider its meaning as Really Simple Syndication. It is a document type that lists updates of websites or blogs available for syndication. These RSS documents (also known as ‘feeds’) may be read using aggregators (news readers). RSS feeds may show headlines only or both headlines and summaries.

To learn how news aggregators/RSS readers work, see this site: http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-readers.htm

13. Post often to keep attracting your subscribers to come back and refer you to others in their networks; include links to other blogs, articles and websites in your posts

14. Use Trackback links when you quote or refer to other blog posts. What is TrackBack? Essentially what this does is send a message from one server to another server letting it know you have posted a reference to their post. The beauty is that a link to your blog is now included on their site.

15. Write articles to post around the web in article directories. Include a link to your blog in the author info box (See example in our signature below).

16. Make a commitment to blog everyday. 10 minutes a day can help increase your traffic as new content attracts search engine spiders. Put it on your calendar as a task every day at the same time.

Tip: Use a hit counter to track your visitor stats: how many unique visitors, how many page views, average length of visit. You can get a free hit counter at http://www.sitemeter.com