Using your business blog to enhance relationships and open lines of communication with your clients and prospects can take on many forms. Whether your business is primarily online, offline, or driven by both click and mortar channels – you can use your business blog to get the word out faster about promotions you’re running.

Online buzz can be created much faster when prospects and clients can interact with you and with each other. They can do this very easily via the comment feature embedded in most blog programs.

That same interaction with offline buyers can lead to more ideas and more buy-in from people who you might not otherwise speak with. Leveraging the communication enhancement that blogs provide brings benefits to both online and offline businesses.

Instead of a boring old static FAQ page, or forcing your clients though a “phone prompt” gauntlet – you can create a business blog to answer questions for your entire client base all at once!

The native organization feaure of blogs that puts the newest post at the top of the page makes it easy to find the most recent questions. And the built in navigation of blog software using categories makes a FAQ business blog more intuitive than a forum for most users. Combine these two features with the right strategy and you’ll have a powerful, convenient, and interactive FAQ resource that not only answers questions for your clients, but also becomes an intuitive online learning resource for your products or services.

Blogging is finally capturing the attention of more and more business owners mainly because of its marketing and search engine optimization potential. But the owners and entrepreneurs who think these are the only applications of business blogging are cutting themselves short.

Blogs have dozens upon dozens of immediate applications for small and large businesses alike. As with any new technology, the real benefits only become apparent when you step away from all the hype and begin to align the technology with the needs, wants, and desires of the people who can use it.

Business blogging is no different. It needs to be viewed as a tool that can be matched with your current operations and client communication channels for maximum leverage in all your business development efforts.

So why are blogs such a powerful online ally for small business owners?

Although there are a number of combined factors that make your blog a powerful online ally, here is what I consider to be the top seven.

• Instant on-demand, online publishing.
• The ability to easily make entire blogs (or individual posts) private/password protected.
• The ease with which the technology can be used. (Only basic technical knowledge is required for the operation and maintenance of blogs. If you can use a word processing program and surf the net, you can use a blog.)
• Automated syndication of content to all subscribers
• Bypassing of all email delivery and Spam filters
• Low cost of operation. (Your “hosting” and your “posting” are your only costs.)
• With the right business blog strategy, you get high impact benefits with both human visitors and search engine spiders.

As a 21st century entrepreneur, these seven factors may have already piqued your interest in business blogging. But I’d like to help you take this even further by giving you some real-world, practical applications for business blogs in your company.

In this series of short articles we’re going to look at 21 examples of how you can use a business blog to create high impact results for yourself and your company.

First we’ll look at 13 examples for the external use of blogs. Then we’ll delve into eight more examples for the internal applications of blogs.

In both cases, these practical examples will help make the useful application of business blogs easier for you to digest and apply.

Stay tuned for a new application idea every day for the next 21-days!

John-Paul Micek
Click-and-Mortar Coach
Business Owners Coaching Club
http:/www.AdvancedBusinessBlogging.com

© Copyright 1999-2005 by RPM Success Group ®

One of the first questions many of our coaching clients have been is “what are the different ways to host my business blog?” It’s a good question, and can be a critical one depending on the purpose and planned application of your business blog. And it’s a critical choice when you consider the search engine optimization goals of your business blog.
To help you identify and understand the differences in hosting options, here’s a business blog audio and video to help explain the difference between

• Third-party hosted blogs
• Self hosted blogs in the root directory of a domain you own (the blog shows up as the main site/URL)
• Self hosted blogs in a sub-directory of a domain you own (the blog showing as a longer URL and your core web site remains as the main URL)

Please note: these audio and video clips are directed toward business owners, entrepreneurs, and others who are looking to maximize the impact of their business blog with both human visitors and search engine spiders. The topics discussed in these clips are not as relevant to personal bloggers or others who are not concerned with SEO.

VIDEO Clip: Business Blog hosting differences explained

Tech Note: You will need Windows Media Player to watch this video. That’s already loaded on Windows-based computers from the factory. If you experience issues with the videos try upgrading Windows Media Player version 9 or higher. You can download version 10 for free at: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/mp10/

Copyright © RPM Success Group Inc. 2002-2006. Other bloggers and journalists are allowed to excerpt and link to posts (as is common with bloggers,) as full credit/attribution is given to AdvancedBusinessBlogging.com and RPM Success Group Inc.

Learn how to unleash the maximum marketing power of business blogs, podcasts, and RSS (in any industry, profession, or niche) with Marketing With Business Blogs™.

John-Paul Micek is a published author and weekly columnist for the Honolulu Star Bulletin. As a Click-and-Mortar Business Coach he helps small business owners integrate offline and online marketing strategies for rapid, reliable business growth. You can reach J.P. directly via [communicationcommando@gmail.com].

What’s the biggest challenge the business blogger faces today? As we talked about in a recent post – it’s the lack of accurate RSS traffic tracking. With the click-and-mortar business coaching we do over at the Business Owners Coaching Club, we’ve seen the lack of syndication analytics as one of the main stumbling blocks for small business owners who want to start leveraging business blogs.

Right now we don’t have much choice. There are some serious compromises that need to be made with the few solutions that are available right now. For example, with FeedBurner you loose the SEO advantage of having your own domain in your RSS feed. (Honestly, that’s the only reason you don’t see a FeedBurner feed on any of our blogs.)

But I’m excited about FeedBurner none-the-less because of the experiential advantage they have. They’re in the RSS traffic-tracking race and at the front of the pack too. From what I understand, Dick Costolo over at FeedBurner has said they’re feverishly working on upgrades that will track user actions. Looking forward to that!

But now there’s another light at the end of the RSS optimization tunnel. (And no … it’s not a train bearing down on us at full steam. :)) There are some real exciting things happening – amazingly fast – in the world of RSS traffic tracking and monitization.

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Q: Should I have a blog AND a newsletter? What are the advantages and disadvantages of having both?

A: Yes – we recommend having BOTH a blog and a newsletter – for a variety of reasons. But for the sake of brevity, here are just a few ideas to get your brain thinking creatively on the concept of using business blogs.

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Although business blogs are quickly chewing their way up the marketing food chain, there still remains a dirty little challenge that must be overcome. That bright orange RSS icon over on the side of your blog can be a knight in shining armor. And it can be a veritable black hole of un-quantifiable uncertainty. (Don’t write me about the double negative. I liked the way it sounded. :-))

Seriously though, RSS feeds, and RSS aggregators in particular have created a client-centric information sharing revolution. Topically focused communities, connection, and dialog – they’re all there. And yet simultaneously RSS technology has created a marketing impact tracking challenge that the vast majority of blogging “pros,” marketing gurus, and business bloggers have been ignoring.

(more…)

Oh My! People and crawlers and spiders, oh my! What’s a lost business blogger to do?

As you step into the blogosphere and try to start using your business blog for maximum marketing impact you may feel like Dorothy trying to reach the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz. Only difference is you don’t have a yellow brick road to follow.

Or do you?

More and more business owners are starting blogs every day. Many of them are doing it with their focus being to get better search engine rankings that bring more traffic to their site, and with that, more exposure for their company. A worthy goal to have indeed.

As they reach for that goal however, far too many fall prey to the belief that frequent postings packed with good keywords alone will bring them the results that want. They believe in the misconception that quality content doesn’t matter to get those top-level rankings.

(more…)

As you look around the net today, you’re starting to see more and more people talking about the positive impact that your business blog can have on your search engine rankings. Some products are even starting to surface that claim to teach you all the tricks and tactics you need to successfully blog.

I was spurred to write this article because I’ve seen some of the “internet marketing crowd” starting to creep into the blogosphere. With that, the waters on the educational side of the blogosphere are getting a little muddy. So I wanted to help clear things up a bit and remove some of the B.S. on blogging floating around.

Don’t get me wrong — I certainly agree that a properly planned blog can work wonders for your Search Engine rankings. Boosting your search engine ranking with your business blog is an absolute fact. And it’s a pretty exciting thing when it happens to you!

But what the vast majority of people and products are missing is (more…)

Yesterday a press release hit the wires that is another good sign for podcasting, and business blogging. It seems that major corporations are seeing a much more attractive sponsorship medium with podcasting vs. straight up blogs.

(from Paidcontent.org)

Ipswitch, Inc. to Underwrite WGBH Podcast of “Morning Stories” Leading SMB Software Developer to Encourage New Podcasting Medium LEXINGTON, MA — (MARKET WIRE) — 01/12/2005 — Ipswitch, Inc., the leading developer of network management, messaging and file transfer solutions for small and medium businesses (SMB), today announced the company has entered into an agreement with public broadcaster WGBH Boston to underwrite the podcasting of “Morning Stories.” The weekly podcast, produced by Tony Kahn at WGBH Radio, offers listeners unexpected vignettes that illuminate life. In addition, Ipswitch has launched its own podcast on its website (http://blogs.ipswitch.com/podcast) offering Ipswitch customers convenient access to technical content such as customization and usage information.

This is a good sign for both podcasting and blogging. As you know, podcasting is based on blogging technology and uses RSS for time delayed delivery of digital radio shows, music files, and any other type of audio content you could imagine. So any good news for podcasting is good news for blogging.

As corporations get involved with sponsorship and direct injection of content, this technology is going to start to move very quickly. Just another reason you need to get your business blogging up to speed as quickly as possible.

John-Paul Micek
Click-and-Mortar Coach
Business Owners Coaching Club
http:/www.AdvancedBusinessBlogging.com