15 Tips: How to Manage Your Business Blog

1. Developing and updating your blog will require an investment of both time and thought, so before you get started, consider whether you can stick to a regular update schedule.
2. Keeping your content fresh will help show your readers that you’re serious about your business. Your posts don’t have to be long, but you’ll want to keep them interesting with up-to-date news, facts and figures, commentary, and other useful information.
3. Make a schedule for yourself, and dedicate time each week for brainstorming, researching article ideas, and writing your posts.
4. Become THE expert! When you write on a topic and the reader learns something, you have just become an expert.  Then, the next time your reader has a thought or question about your industry, he’ll come to you as the business that can give him the solution or information he’s looking for.
5. A blog is NOT a brochure. Brochures can be boring and are rarely read from beginning to end. Your blog is a place to share useful content. Instead of “We’re the best at XYZ”, show your readers how your skills actually helped someone, how your product solved a problem or how your expertise saved a client time or money.
6. Be sure that your small business blog focuses on the relevant keywords in which you are writing.  If you own an office supply store, you’ll want to focus your text on the various products you sell and the solutions they offer.
7. Don’t just talk about how you’ve won “Best Auto Repair Shop in Franklinville, MN” for 10 years running. I recommend a 90/10 ratio of interesting content to self-promotion.
8. Be sure that your business blog focuses on consistent, fresh, and relevant content. Be up on the latest trends in your industry. That shows that you are current, involved in the latest industry trends and serious about what you do.
9. How often should you blog? I’d recommend writing at least once a week, on a regular basis. If you have the staff or time, it would be best to blog 2-4 times a week. But the most important word is CONSISTENCY. If you blog 10 times in two weeks and then wait 4 months before you blog again, your SEO will not benefit and your readers may think you’re ‘fly-by-night’.
10. Make it easy for your readers to contact the blog author. Be sure that your pages have an email link included.
11. Who should write for your blog? You need someone who is invested in the business and has good, all around knowledge of what you do and why it’s beneficial. For a very small business blog, the owner or lead sales associate might be a good fit. For a larger business, the Marketing Team would most likely oversee the blog. Also, good business blogs allow the perspectives of various employees shine on that blog. Let them share their personal stories and experiences with your readers. And, don’t forget to choose people who have good writing skills!
12. Be sure to use social media to promote your blog. Post your blog links on Facebook and Twitter. Share photos on flickr or videos on youtube. Throw a flier in your shopping bags or on your counter to let people know your blog exists.
13. Work smart! Maximize your time and effort. If you’re in a particularly prolific mood, don’t write just one post, but several. Then, if you use WordPress or even other blogging software, you can set your post to publish at a later date. So, you can write numerous posts, or start posts to finish later and not worry about having incomplete content showing up online.
14. If you need help, you can pay someone (like Santa Clara Design) to help you strategize, plan and even write posts for your business blog. Sometimes it’s worth paying for help to make sure that you’re on the right track!

Keep an eye out for future posts on “How to Promote Your Business Blog” and “How to Manage Social Media for a Small Business”

10 reasons why your business should have a blog…

When I say “blog” you might think of your cousin Pam who posts recipes and photos of her cat every three days. You may think that a “blog” has nothing to do with you, your life, your business or your success.

Let me convince you otherwise.

1. Your blog is the perfect place to share your thoughts and knowledge on subjects related to your business, create links to useful information, and post news and other announcements.
2. Use your blog to give your business a personal face and voice. Allow your customers to get to know you and why you stand behind your product.
3. A well planned and managed blog can help you build your professional reputation and gain your customers’ trust.
4. Sharing your viewpoint and participating in the ongoing industry discussions is alwasy a huge benefit to a company.
5. A company should want to be as involved as they can be to manage their online reputation: it’s where your current and future customers are already devoting their time and attention.
6. Allowing customers to communicate with you on your blog shows an openness and willingness to listen and receive feeback. It might be a vulnerable spot, but anyone truly wanting to provide a better customer experience should be eager to receive customer feeback.
7. A blog, linked with social media outlets, can be even more powerful a tool for promoting your business.
8. Your blog should embody the brand of your business. Your employees will certainly come forward with great ideas for posts. Reward their creativity and dedication, allow them to help!
9. A well-done blog makes it easy to add and update content, so there’s always something fresh on the site.
10. SEO value: Despite what some may say, content is still king. Search engines like Google like regular updates, and creating new pages, full of relevant keywords from your new posts is a perfect way to increase the size of your site, and ultimately increase traffic by improving your search engine ranking chances.

Giveaway for Catholic Blog, Ministry or Church

In honor of the patroness of my business, St. Clare of Assisi, I am offering a giveaway!

Here are the details:

• You must be a Catholic ministry, Catholic Church or Catholic-focused blog
• You will get a free, custom designed WordPress site as per your design style and suggestions
• You will need to pay for hosting
• To enter, please follow me on Twitter, or like my Facebook Page and leave a comment here letting me know you have done that
• You must leave me your email address
• Entries will be closed at midnight on Monday August 15th
• I will use Random.org to select the winner
• I will announce the winner on Tuesday, August 16th

St. Clare of Assisi is my confirmation saint. 9 years ago, I had my second child and decided that I needed to stay home with my children, but contribute to the family coffers. Santa Clara Design was born! One of my commitments has been to offer my skills to the Church, to help promote Her teachings through the media. My business been blessed and I am very thankful my work and the wonderful clients that I have the opportunity to work with.

So, in honor of St. Clare (you can learn more about her here) I want to offer this giveaway as a way to say ‘thank you’ and give back.

Spread the word!

10 Reasons Why You Should Switch to WordPress…

10 Reasons Why you Should switch to WordPress from Blogger, Typepad, etc…

Many people start blogging (as I did way back when) with a free blogging software like blogger, typepad or wordpress.com. These blogs are simple, they’re free and for some people, that’s all they need. However, many bloggers eventually come to the realization that they need “more”. They want more control over their posts, they want more control over their user experience, they want more control over design, security, SEO and a million other things. If you think this might be YOU, then read on. Let me convince you of the greatness of a hosted WordPress site.

1.     Self-Hosted

When you switch your blog over to WordPress.org (learn about the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org here) you will have to have your site hosted somewhere. I highly recommend Bluehost. You’ll have to take a few minutes to purchase a hosting account (around $9/month… not a bad investment) and install WordPress. Bluehost walks you through the whole thing. Or you can have an expert help you out.

The benefit to having hosted blog is that you “own” your content.  This gives you even more power and ability to customize your WordPress installation. And you have control over ownership, code and backups.

2.     Support

This is one of my biggest selling points for clients. WordPress sites have almost unlimited support. First, you have the WordPress forums. This is an extensive network of probably every WordPress question and answer in the world. If it’s been an issue, it’s on the WordPress forum. In addition, there are thousands of WordPress Developers that host their own support forums to help clients, or potential clients. And, if you need expert help, you can always hire a WordPress expert to help you out. Unlike other custom-coded content management systems out there, with a WordPress blog or website, you will always have someone who can help you out.

3.     Design

As a designer at heart, the design aspect of WordPress is what I love most.  A WordPress blogger will have hundreds of thousands of themes to choose from. There are free themes and themes that you can buy. And, if you really want to spruce up your site, you’ll probably want to consider a custom theme for your design. With WordPress, you have complete control over the branding, design and layout of your site. And, man, these sites can look great!

4.     Plugins & Widgets

You can make WordPress be and do almost anything you want! Currently, there are over 13,000 WordPress plugins in the WordPress Plugin Directory. Oh, did I forget to mention that they’re FREE?! Yes, FREE. Just take a look and see what I’m talking about. In addition to these, there are tons more plugins that you can purchase for more complex needs. However, most site requirements can be met by utilizing the free plugins. Widgets give you a simple way to arrange the various elements of your sidebar content. They’re simple, but powerful ways to customize your WordPress blog or website in a snap.

5.     Run an entire website

WordPress isn’t just limited to blogging. In fact, the majority of my clients use WordPress as a CMS (Content Management System). They may include a blog on their site, but they can have pages, a store, photo galleries, contact forms and hundreds of other features on their site.  My clients love this ability to update and change their content when ever they need to. And I love using WordPress as a CMS because it allows my clients to take care of the little things for themselves (who really wants to pay someone to add a paragraph or a photo to a page?) and let me tackle the bigger projects for them. Better use of your money all around!

6.     Run multiple websites

WordPress 3.0 integrated the functionality of WordPress MU (Multi-User) right in to the installation, now called WordPress multisite or MS. Once activated, you’re running a network of websites, each potentially on their own domain. So, you can now run multiple blogs from one installation of WordPress. A bit more complicated than a single user WordPress installation, but with multisite, you can give your visitors their own blog: “visitor.yoursite.com” or a realtor can give each of his realtors their own blog: “individualrealtor.realtycompany.com”. Pretty cool!

7.     Control

As I mentioned before, WordPress gives you complete control over the look and feel of your website. You also have complete control over the code. WordPress  allows you to edit all of the code in your site, unlike the free blogging software out there.  Want to customize your site?  You can!   Don’t know how to do it?   You can find someone who does.

8.     Simplicity

But, WordPress can also be extremely simple if you want it to be. The  control panel for WordPress is very user friendly. When you edit a page or post, you have the option between “visual” view or “html” view. The content editor is a WYSIWYG editor similar to Word.  And there are even built in tools for you to import content from Word or a .txt document.

9.     Comment Management

WordPress offers superior comment management. That’s really important to bloggers! Manage comments from your admin panel, specify comment pagination, threaded comments, spam monitoring, comment notification, comment subscription and much more!

10.   SEO

WordPress naturally offers great SEO-friendly code. WordPress, straight out of the box, comes ready to embrace search engines. Its features and functions guide a search engine through the posts, pages, and categories to help the search engine crawl your site and gather the information it needs to include your site within its database. And, since WordPress works so well as a CMS, adding content is easy. And content is important when it comes to SEO.

Giveaway ~ Camera Phone lens by Photojojo

Become a fan on Facebook and leave a comment on the facebook post, and you enter yourself to win either the wide angle/macro OR the fisheye camera phone lens from Photojojo.  It’s on MY Christmas wishlist – and I thought you might like one too!

The lenses work with any camera phone and attach by a simple adhesive magnetic ring. Turn your phone into a even better tool for your website and/or social media with these super fun lenses!

« Previous Page — Next Page »