Tomorrow, Sept. 1, 2005 has been designated Blog Relief Day for vicitms of Hurricane Katrina.

Deb and I have decided to put out a $1,000 matching challenge to all our readers and subscribers.

See how you can participate to use your business blog and your donations four a “double impact” over at the Business Owner’s Blog.

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 business section of the Honolulu Star Bulletin. He’s known as the “Click-and-Mortar Business Coach” by business owners around the world thanks to members of the Business Owners Coaching Club™.


The © Copyright to all audio, video, images, and text are held by RPM Success Group Inc.® and licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Marketing Sherpa recently released a mini-case study on a professional and small business owner who definitely could use a business blog to boost her online marketing results. It’s open for public access until Sept 9th here.

This is a great overview of the basics of Web site optimization, and it highlights the key points addressed to boost marketing results with higher search engine rankings.

Women’s health specialist Dr. Randine Lewis used a powerful combination of Web marketing plus bookstore presence to attract hundreds of women to her $10,500 retreats. Yep, that’s right — $10K-plus live events primarily sold online!

Now while that’s impressive, and she has gotten good enough results to turn off her ad-words campaign — she could be getting much higher rankings in the top search engines if she were to add a business blog to the site.

The results prove it out

A quick review of search rankings in both Yahoo and Google for the keywords “fertility” and “infertility” yielded no results for Dr. Lewis’s site in the top 5o results. And using the search term “fertility retreat” (which by the way is the actual URL used by Dr. Lewis, www.fertilityretreat.com,) yielded a position at #11 in Yahoo and #31 in Google on 08/31/05.

Incorporating a carefully crafted business blogging strategy into her overall marketing plan would give Dr. Lewis a powerful advantage over her competitors on her top keyword phrases. With a proper understanding of how to structure the navigation of her business blog, how to select and incorporate keyword phrases in critical areas, and a few other simple (but little known) business blogging strategies — Dr. Lewis would be amazed at the results.

Not only would she gain a top 10 ranking on certain keyword phrases within 30-days, she would be: (more…)

Yes, all you students of the Marketing With Business Blogs multi-media coaching course — you know how we LOVE WordPress. With complete control over coding, customization (for both function and appearance,) along with the reliability and zero cost factors of open source software — WordPress is a winner.

Yet even with the step-by-step videos included in the level 202 materials of the course (including installation, management, and optimization of a self-hosted WordPress business blog,) some business owners have found it easier to turn to Blog Harbor or Square Space than to mess with a WordPress install.

Well now there’s a viable alternative. A solution that has all the convenience of a third-party hosted blog service, with a lot of the functionality and control of WordPress. It’s WordPress.com.

And yes — that’s WordPress.com, not WordPress.org (the completely open source software requiring self-hosting.)

You can check out a very detailed article written by Lorell VanFossen on the new service over at http://lorelle.wordpress.com. Lorell does a fantastic job of laying out a complete overview of the up-and-coming service.

It may be just the high-powered “middle of the road” software solution you’ve been looking for to reliably run your business blog.

Enjoy!

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 business section of the Honolulu Star Bulletin. He’s known as the “Click-and-Mortar Business Coach” by business owners around the world thanks to members of the Business Owners Coaching Club™.


The © Copyright to all audio, video, images, and text are held by RPM Success Group Inc.® and licensed under a Creative Commons License.

If your business blog is still 100% written word you’re missing out on an entirely new level of interaction with your target audience. Business podcasts and video are an outstanding way to deepen your relationship with prospects and clients.

If you’re already using podcasts to maximize your marketing inside and outside your business blog — then congratulations. You’re probably a leader in your niche already.

As you gain more experience with podcast production though, you’ll probably get to the point where you want to add music to your show without violating copyright laws. Until just recently good music for jazzing up your business podcasts has been hard to come by.

Now there are some great resources available to you for what’s called “royalty free music.” (That’s music you can freely use in your podcasts and other audio productions.) Here are what we consider the top three sources:

http://www.instantroyaltyfreemusic.com/

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http://musicbakery.com/

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http://music.podshow.com/

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Remember that your business blog is simply a conduit. You can communicate with the written word, images, audio (business podcasts), and video (v-blogging.) Get creative and imagine all the multi-dimensional ways you can maximize your marketing using your business blog as the basis.

Enjoy!

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 business section of the Honolulu Star Bulletin. He’s known as the “Click-and-Mortar Business Coach” by business owners around the world thanks to members of the Business Owners Coaching Club™.


The © Copyright to all audio, video, images, and text are held by RPM Success Group Inc.® and licensed under a Creative Commons License.

In a continuation of our review of three simple strategies for using RSS in your marketing inside and outside of your business blog, here’s strategy #2 and #3 with two more “money making RSS marketing ideas” to go with them. (Part 1 here)

Extend your existing advertising and branding efforts with RSS

Subscribers who regularly review headlines in your business blog are more likely to keep your brand top of mind, even if they’re only perusing those headlines once per week. Remember that intentional branding requires you carefully craft the way your RSS feeds are written.

And when it comes to literal advertising, you can wrap those into an RSS reader or buy advertising on RSS feeds using a service such as Pheedo.

Money making RSS marketing idea#2: Make your marketing and branding engaging. Use a mix of video, audio, and static content — then use links everywhere you can think of to encourage users to view it and interact with you.

Distribute internal team communications, client specific content, and press releases using RSS

When properly systemized RSS feeds allow you to painlessly keep your internal employee team well informed. These type of internal applications of RSS make you money by dropping dollars right to the bottom line. (Always the sweetest type of profit increase, because it’s a cost savings too!)

And when it comes to delivering “premium content” (for a fee) to audiences, you can make sure ONLY people who have paid for the content will recieve it. With recent advancements in “subscriber only” RSS feeds, you can rest assured that both your internal/private content and your premium content will stay that way. You get all the instant delivery benefits of RSS Feeds along with enhanced security.

Money making RSS marketing idea#2: Make sure your premium content RSS feeds are short and informative. This will ensure recipients read them through.

If you have your business blog up and running, make sure you’re fully leveraging the technology to maximize it’s impact on your marketing. Once you’ve discovered the proven methods for unleashing the full marketing power of business blogs, RSS, and podcasting — you’ll see why we so strongly recommend these channels as permenat parts of your overall business marketing strategy.

No matter what stage your business blogging effectiveness is, remember that a written business blogging strategy and regular content schedule is critical for successful implementation.

John-Paul Micek is a contributing partner in the only multi-media course that truly coaches business owners how to integrate business blogging for more traffic, more clients, and more profits — Marketing With Business Blogs.

He’s a published author and weekly columnist for the business section of the Honoulu Star Bulletin. He’s known as the “Click-and-Mortar Business Coach” by by business owners around the world thanks to members of the Business Owners Coaching Club™.


The © Copyright to all audio, video, images, and text are held by RPM Success Group Inc.® and licensed under a Creative Commons License.

When it comes to business blogging and it’s uses for marketing, business owners are just starting to catch on. Here at Advanced Business Blogging we’ve revealed a number of strategies and covered the obvious benefits of business blogging including relationship building with your prospects, increasing the dialog with clients, and the resulting boosts in search engine ranking when your business blogging strategy is properly executed.

But if you just stop there, you’ll be short-changing yourself as most business owners do who blindly jump into blogging. The technology has virtually limitless applications, and RSS feeds (the underlying power of blogs) is where a wealth of marketing benefits lie.

Unless you’ve completed the Marketing With Business Blogs multi-media coaching course (or something just as powerful,) you may be unaware of the significant marketing impact RSS feeds themselves can bring to your business. But when you learn to leverage both your business blog and RSS feeds (inside and outside your blogs,) you’ll unleash the true marketing power of business blogs and RSS that most owners simply get hyped up about.

In the next couple of posts I’ll share three simple strategies for using RSS in your marketing, and three money making RSS marketing ideas — just to get you thinking.

For today, here’s strategy #1… (more…)

OK, after a week and a half of recovering from oral surgery — I’m finally catching up with things in the office and able to start blogging here again. Things have continued to hum along over at the Business Owners Blog while I was out of commission thanks to our systemization and office team. But Advanced Business Blogging is my baby and that’s why the “lull” in activity.

I should be back in the swing of things tomorrow and posting new articles in a day or two.

Enjoy!

John-Paul Micek is a contributing partner in the only multi-media course that truly coaches business owners how to integrate business blogging for more traffic, more clients, and more profits — Marketing With Business Blogs.

He’s a published author and weekly columnist for the business section of the Honoulu Star Bulletin. He’s known as the “Click-and-Mortar Business Coach” by by business owners around the world thanks to members of the Business Owners Coaching Club™.


The © Copyright to all audio, video, images, and text are held by RPM Success Group Inc.® and licensed under a Creative Commons License.