If you’ve been wondering about marketing with podcasts and how you can use New Media Marketing with your business blog, I’ve got something special for you. Watch this video, then check out how they’re making money with this and read my bold prediction on their upcoming success!
Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine are two comedians from LA who have put together (among other things) the AskaNinja.com site. It’s a compilation of hilarious, clean but cutting, comedy clips.
When you check out the site you’ll see how funny they are. (This’ll give you some idea of my and Deb’s sense of humor.) Kent and Doug have put together an incredibly professional multimedia blog too. Must be that LA air they breathe. Or maybe a friend who’s an awesome video editor!
Anyway — when you go to Ask A Ninja, you’ll probably wonder why they’re putting this much effort into a free multimedia blog.
How are they making money? And what’s this have to do with business or Advanced Business Blogging?
Well, first of all Kent and Doug are promoting their main business Beatbox Giant (BBG.) Secondly they’re currently in production on an animated show called ‘Kinzai Ninjas‘ that will be out later in 2006. Building an audience now, before the release is smart, stealth like marketing. Just like a Ninja.
And when it comes to blogging for business, building an audience — that’s priority #1 for business owners. Even though it’s not the same as a “typical” business, Ask A Ninja shows how building a list fast can be done.
Lots of ideas over there. And once again, here’s another business blog that proves that you can get the marketing results you want without posting multiple posts per day like so many blogging evangelists promote.
Building a massive list? Here’s what I mean….
The first post over at Ask A Ninja was 1/9/06, but the real (more…)
When you’re blogging for business, you need to be as efficient as possible if you’re going to drop the maximum profits possible to your bottom line. And when it comes to moderate/heavy marketing with business blogs, efficiency starts with the administrative management of your blog. If you can minimize the amount of time you or one of your team needs to spend administering your blog — you can focus more time and effort on marketing actions that yield more traffic, more sales, and more profits.
Minimizing your research time and maximizing your results is why we put this series of Business Blogging Plugin articles together. Being busy business owners ourselves, we want to save you time by sharing what we know works best and help you filter through the hundreds of plugins available to help streamline your blog admin when using WordPress.
So without further delay — here’s the first installment covering general blog administration and content protection. These are the plugins we’ve found (through our testing and the testing of our blog coaching clients) to be the most valuable especially, for small business owners.
EASING THE ADMINISTRATION OF YOUR BUISINESS BLOG
Event Calendar
This plugin is particularly helpful if you run special events for promoting your business (online or offline.) It’s also great if you’re using WordPress for a membership-type setup (paid of free.) It makes posting a practical, interactive event calendar in the navigation column of your blog a snap.Here’s the page for downloads and updated information on this WordPress plugin: Event Calendar.
Category Organizer
WordPress has lots of advantages with it’s extensive category capabilities. Advantages for both practical organization and search engine optimization. But sometimes when you have a lot of categories on your business blog, or when you’re using WordPress for more a membership type site for subscribers — you want more direct control over the way your categories show up.
‘Category Order 1.9.2′ allows you to set the explicit ordering, spacing, and indentation of categories in the category list that appears in the sidebar. All you need to do is use the handy “Category Order” management page to customize your navigation area and make things look exactly like you want.
Here’s the page for downloads and updated information on this WordPress plugin: Category Organizer plugin (Scroll to the bottom of the page and look for ‘Category Order 1.9.2′)
PodPress ****
If you’re going to be using your business blog to it’s full potential, you’ll want to be using multimedia (audio, video, PDFs, and regular blog posts.) And there is hands down no better way to make that multimedia posting easy than this great 4-star plugin called PodPress.
How about 30-plus inches of rain in 21 days and 800-foot waterfall whose runoff goes right through your backyard?!
OK, admittedly, when it comes to blogging for business, I’m not really a big fan of small, frequent posts. That’s fine when it matches your style and flows well with the way you work and compliments the way your company operates. Deborah and I however, both have styles that make longer, more educational articles and topical series flow easy.
Now that approach usually works well for us no matter what our commitments are for product creation, strategic partnering, or traveling to the mainland to research new real estate investments. But when weather like we’ve been hit with during March happens, even with an average posting frequency of 3-4 days per week on the blogs we use for business and marketing — it’s just not possible to keep up.
So since posting here at Advanced Business Blogging has suffered during March, I figured I’d share a few photos from our town on the North Shore of Hawaii over the past three weeks. They don’t do any real justice to the size, majesty, and in this case — run off potential of the mountains.
The height of the mountains here makes the size of the falls decieving on this shot. The main waterfall runs at about 30-40 feet across and about five feet deep in normal rains. The volume at the time of this shot was roughly double that. BTW - this waterfall has over a 1000-foot drop!
This is a view of the same valley, north west (right) side. You can see three waterfalls running. To give you scale, all are about 20-25 feet across.
Hawaii? Bad weather? Yes, Hawaii does get rain. And on the North Shores of all five of the main islands — get lots! And it can be very localized. For instance, in our town we got over 30-inches of rain in the past 21-days! Storm after storm came through with little rest in between.
One storm was such a heavy rain producer when it got stuck over the Ko’olau Mountains that it produced an average of 3-inches per hour for more than 4-hours!
One runoff area at a house in town. This is the type of water feature no one wants this close to their house.
All the water from the waterfall in the first shot up above needed to go somewhere. Well, here it is. Over 50-feet of the yard was swept away from this house in less than six-hours! (The house in front of it - not so lucky. It came tumbling down, and had the military out here watching to make sure the rest of it didn’t fall in the stream and take out the bridge.)
With mountain peaks jutting 2,300 feet into the sky in less than 3/4-mile from the ocean — there’s not really any place for the water to disperse. That gives us pluses, and minuses. The pluses are the 49 waterfalls in our town. It’s simply awesome to behold!
Simply breath-taking!
But quite a few of those waterfalls can do a lot of (more…)
Note: normally we won’t cover blogging questions focused primarily on driving traffic for monetization with for Adsense. But this question and it’s answer hold so much valuable education for business owners marketing their own products and services with blogs, I just had to share it with you.
Blogging for Business Question:
I recently stumbled upon your blog about business blogging and I really got a lot out of your coaching posts. I have a question that I think you might be able to help me with , so here goes.
Is it possible to host my own blog in a subdirectory of my own url and post, edit, and publish this blog with a web based admin panel? I am setting up a adsense website about travel before I head out to travel the world myself for a few months, and I would love to be able to host a blog on my site that can be updated while AI am on the road.
Obviously, I will not have access to my home computer and would need to be able to publish from internet cafes around the world. Any help on this or feedback on my idea would be instantly helpful.
Thanks a lot.
Zach
Advanced Business Blogging Answer:
Aloha Zach,
Sorry for not getting back to you sooner. I was traveling myself and returned home to Hawaii last week with lots of rain (24-inches in 4-days at one point) plus intermittent flooding over the last two weeks.
Anyway, to answer your questions…
Hosting your own blog in a subdirectory
Yes you can definitely host your own blog in a subdirectory. I’d recommend using WordPress since it’s open source and gives you a very nice online admin panel to work with from anywhere in the world. It’s what the vast majority of small business owners we work with use to run their business blogs.
This type of setup on your own domain(s) will give you MUCH more control over your keyword relevancy and ranking. Plus, all the work you put into the keyword relevancy and ranking of that domain is portable (it’s your domain to move/host where you want.) That’s not true with third-party hosted services like Blogger, TypePad, or BlogHarbor. Since you seem to be building a network of traffic generating blogs — this should be of primary interest to you.
Some feedback, ideas, and coaching on your ‘adventure blogging’ focus
I think it’s a great idea what you’re doing linking your upcoming travels around the world with traffic generation. One suggestion I would make is coming up with a narrow focus for your adventure/travel blog. Something that will really attract an interested/targeted audience.
Business owners often make the same mistake when blogging. When an owner is going to market their own products or services with business blogs, targeted traffic is the key. And when you get creative with a blogging format or use a blog in a journaling/diary format — whether for fun or to monetize the traffic with Adsense — a narrow niche focus is just as important.
To help explain what I mean more fully , let’s set (more…)
