If you’ve been following along in this series, we’re going to get right to Law #5 from the 12 Laws of Online Marketing with Business Blogs, RSS, and Podcasts. (If you missed earlier installments to this 13-part series, you can catch up here in the Marketing With Business Blogs archives.)

Law #5. Headlines are the frontline of all your business blogging, online, and off-line marketing efforts

Just as all ads, sales letters, brochures, flyers, news releases, and commercials need a headline – so do your business blog posts. Whether it’s an article, regular post, podcast, or even a v-blog (video post on your blog,) your headline is where the battle for people’s attention is either one or lost.

This isn’t for reasons of personal style or preference. Test after test has proven that any article or promotional piece with a headline – any headline – will out-perform one without a headline. And if you can craft a headline centered on the major benefit you’ll bring your readers or listeners in your article or podcast, the difference in response can be astounding.

People have very little free time today. Between shuffling the kids around from soccer to ballet, picking up the dry cleaning, making dinner, waiting in line at the bank, cleaning up after the new puppy, or a host of the hundreds of other things that are vying for people’s attention – what would make them stop and pay attention to what you have to say?

Well, going back to Law #1 and Law #2 of Marketing With Business Blogs would certainly help. But with time being so precious, you still need to cut through all the noise. And that’s where a good headline comes in.

Spiders like good headlines too!

It’s not just human beings that find headlines important. Search engine spiders put a lot of (more…)

You know what I find simply frustrating? It’s watching perfectly viable businesses go down the tubes. Or worse, struggle for years just getting by because they don’t know how to effectively market their goods and services using a click-and-mortar (online and off-line) approach. Maybe it’s just me, but I hate to see this happen.

In my work as a click-and-mortar business coach I’m driven with an evangelistic zeal to optimize every resource a business has so that performance and profits can be maximized (and that includes business blogging.)

Why? Because I believe that business owners are put into a position to bless people…

· To provide products and services that improve people’s lives.

· To provide an environment that provides opportunities for employees to better their lives.

· To live a lifestyle that is fulfilling and satisfying far beyond what any other venture would bring.

And that’s exactly why we’ve taken the time to create this 13-part series covering the 12 Laws of Online Marketing with Business Blogs, RSS, and Podcasts. To help you take significant steps towards each of those goals by creating a more efficient system for building your prospect list and increasing client loyalty.

If you’ve been following along in this series, we’re going to jump right to Law #4 from the 12 Laws of Online Marketing with Business Blogs, RSS, and Podcasts. (If you missed earlier installments to this 13-part series, you’ll want to go back and read the introduction to learn some critical requirements for making these laws work in your business. You can find them here in the Marketing With Business Blogs archive.)

Law #4. Leverage every thought, action, and physical asset for maximum performance and profits

Leverage is a topic that spreads laterally and permeates your company down to every nook and cranny. It deserves at least a 6-week coaching program to be fully mastered. But what I can do here in Part #5 of this series is give you a solid introduction to leverage as it relates to business blogging. An introduction that will ignite your passion for unleashing the hidden profits lurking in your business.

First, let’s define what we mean by leverage

In the simplest terms, leverage means to multiply and maximize the productivity of a resource. Any resource.

For example, I recently worked with a business owner in the financial services arena to coach his sales team on how to encourage clients to increase their average investment amount by 15%. With no additional cost or effort, he just leveraged his sales staff. He increased the company’s sales productivity and his profits by 15%.

Leverage applied to business blogging, RSS, and podcasts

Let’s take a look at a real life example of leverage in action on the World Live Web. Another one of our business coaching clients was struggling to get better search engine rankings for her main website (and by default, her physical store locations) with her business blog. She was already blogging two to three times per week herself, with three of her employees contributing to the blog at least once per week each. That’s a total of five to six posts with new content each week.

We met to review her (more…)

If you’ve been following along in this series, we’re going to get right to Law #3 from the 12 Laws of Online Marketing with Business Blogs, RSS, and Podcasts. If you missed earlier installments to this 13-part series, you’ll want to go to the Marketing With Business Blogs category to catch all the other laws.

A common question we get from our business coaching clients about business blogs, podcasts, and RSS applications is the ROI (Return on Investment) you can expect. This is a personal question that is unique to your industry and business goals, and it’s one that really requires significant analysis to determine what metrics you’ll even track. But what I can share with you today in Law #3 should be the #1 determining factor in how much time, money, and effort you budget for your business blogging.

Law #3. Know the Lifetime Value of your clients

Lifetime Value (or LTV)… sadly many businesses have no idea what this means. And if they know, they don’t understand how to calculate this crucial figure and how to put it to use to literally squash the competition. While there’s no way for me to effectively show you how to harness the full force of this extraordinary concept in a short article, I can explain lifetime value for you - simply and clearly, and then we’ll relate it to your marketing with business blogs.

Lifetime Value defined by example

LTV is defined as the total dollar amount your average client purchases over the entire period (life) that they’re likely to do business with you.

You can use actual sales figures from past years to arrive at an exact figure, or you can estimate. Either way there are some strategies for making your estimates more accurate, but for the sake of brevity, let me share a quick example using actual historical numbers.

Let’s say that you’ve determined that (more…)

If you’ve been following along in this series, we’re going to jump right into Law #2 from the 12 Laws of Online Marketing with Business Blogs, RSS, and Podcasts.

(If you missed earlier installments to this 13-part series, you’ll want to go back and read part 1 and part 2 to learn some critical requirements for making these laws work in your business.)

Law #2. Your business blogging (and all your online marketing) must start with your USP in mind

Your USP is your “Unique Selling Proposition”. It’s a simple statement of the specific advantages you bring to your clients. It’s a clear statement of what sets you apart from your competitors. Whether communicating online or off-line with your target audience, your USP must be at the core of the conversation. And, in keeping with the first Law of Marketing with Business Blogs, your USP must always be centered on your clients

Your USP woos your target audience

Your USP is a concise, benefit focused, and easy to understand statement. A good USP will be between seven and 18 words. The main purpose of your USP is to answer the question “why should I do business with you instead of your competitor?”

A classic example of a nearly flawless USP is (more…)

If you missed the introduction to this 13-part series, you’ll want to go back and read part 1 now to learn some critical requirements for making these laws work in your business. If you’re following along in this series, let’s jump right into the first of the 12 Laws of Online Marketing with Business Blogs, RSS, and Podcasts.

Law #1. All of your business, all of your online marketing, and all of your profits depend on your clients.

While this may seem obvious, if you consider the failure rate of businesses today, and the number of owners who are suffering with sub-par results of their online and off-line marketing — the only thing that is obvious is that most small business owners and professionals don’t really understand this law.

The true function of any successful business is to connect people with solutions to their wants, needs, and wishes. To put it bluntly – the people in your target audience don’t give a rip about you or your business. They shouldn’t be asked to. All they care about is (more…)

Welcome to this power packed, profit-building series. This is the introduction to a 13 part series on how small business owners and professionals can maximize their marketing using business blogs, RSS (Real Simple Syndication,) and podcasts.

In this series you’ll learn:

- Today’s most effective way to market online to get the search engine rankings and targeted traffic you want
- How to grow your subscriber and prospect list faster than a corn stalk on a rainy August afternoon in Nebraska.
- Unlock surging streams of new sales in your small business, and start reclaiming a bankroll of lost profits from your previous online efforts?

If any of these benefits peek your interest, then this article series is for you.

Why 12 laws? And why are they so important for you and your business?

In this special 13-part series, you’ll be (more…)

“Don’t blog! The tool may be too powerful” warns Steve Broback from the Blog Business Summit on Oct 29th, when he wrote a brief (and quite humorous) editorial about the recent Forbes cover article “Attack of the Blogs”.

(By the way, if you go to this link, unfortunately, you may have to skip the flash cover pages that Forbes forces you through before you get to the direct article link. But two quick “skip this” clicks later - and you’ll see the article about how powerful business blogging may be.)

Steve Broback co-founder of the Blog Business Summit writes,

“We’ve realized that this type of web site may just be too powerful for the world to assimilate at this time. It’s just too easy, too inexpensive, and too influential of a media platform. We’re concerned that if we accidentally make the wrong type of post, entire industries may be devestated.”

I must admit, Steve Broback did a great job putting a smile on my face, and I actually found myself chuckling out loud, in the privacy of my office.

I wish the writers from the Blog Business Summit would make finding their permalinks a little easier. That way I could direct you to his humorous post, where he issues a sarcastic warning about the “dangers of business blogging“.

Hopefully they’ll read this post and begin doing so, that way, I could link to them more. Maybe the practical uses behind including permalinks on blog posts will be a topic for one of their upcoming conferences.

In the meantime, I’ll include Boback’s excerpt here, so you can share the chuckle I enjoyed, and then we can laugh together! Especially if you’re enjoying the guilty pleasures of business blogging! If you’re strategically marketing with your business blog and using the power of business blogging to your advantage, you’re grinning as you read this - aren’t you?

I could almost see Steve slyly grinning as he typed,

“We are encouraging our business clients to go back to static HTML and non-syndicating sites so that they have less influence and a smaller audience.

We will shutter this site immediately, forego Movable Type and boot up PageMill for any further communication.

All future events we have planned intended to teach businesses how to leverage this frightening platform will be put on hold.”

What do you think of Forbes article on business blogging?
What are the possible implications for your business?

Comment spam, blog-and-ping, RSS robots — they’re all a pain in the butt for anyone serious about business blogging.

How bad is the problem? According to some researchers, nearly 30 percent of blog posts today are spam. And once you add in spam comments, the number reaches upwards of 50 percent.

Blogs designed to spew spam on the world live web have a name now — splog. It’s listed in Wikipedia as something that is “often nonsense or text stolen from other web sites with an unusually high number of links to sites associated with the splog creator which are often disreputable or otherwise useless Web sites.”

It’s interesting to note that Wikipedia also notes that, “splogs have become a major problem on free blog hosts such as Google’s Blogger service.” I almost wonder if Google is leaving that gaping whole open to learn how to come up with effective methods to adjust their search engine algorithms and discount these spam morons. That’s a subject of a whole nother post, but it’s interesting to take note of.

Anyway, as a business blogger, it can get pretty frustrating logging in to your admin area and then finding several dozen spam comments. And it can get even worse. Apparently higher ranked blogs get hit with more comment spam. I’ve had as many as 150-200 spam comments on this and another of our top ranked business blogs in a 24-48 hour period. Outrageous!

Luckily the open source community of programmers supporting WordPress have been hard at work creating plugins to help stop comment spam. But since we’ve been focusing on the launch of the Marketing With Business Blogs multi media coaching course over the last month or so, I haven’t had time to implement any programming updates on our blogs. But I have had the time to make one simple change that has cut our comment spam down by 98% — literally!!

5 simple steps to dramatically reducing comment spam on your business blog

Here’s what I did, and what you can do too if you’re dealing with lots of comment spam on your business blog (on WordPress.)

Step 1. For WordPress users, login into the admin area of your business blog. Click on the “options” tab, and then on the “discussion” tab. Scroll down a bit and you’ll see a sub-heading titled “Before a comment appears:.” Make sure that the check box next to “An administrator must approve the comment (regardless of any matches below)” is ticked. This is your first line of defense against spam comments going live on your business blog.



Step 2. Next, review all (more…)