Well, after lots of investigative research with top book publishing, public relations, and marketing experts — it’s ready. “Guerilla Book Authoring With Blogs” will be revealed to a very limited group of authors and business owners at the sold out Publishing 4 Profits workshop in Ann Arbor Michigan.

We’re really excited about this opportunity to present at the Publishing 4 Profits seminar hosted by our good friend and internet marketing mentor Stephen Pierce. It’s being held at the very cool, creative, and profit producing Thinkubator facility in Ann Arbor. (Curious about the Thinkubator concept? Learn more by clicking on the light bulb!)

Why we’re so excited

Going to the Thinkubator in Ann Arbor is always a blast! The people who attend are some of the most attentive, action oriented business owners we have the pleasure of working with.

This weekend is a really exclusive event for serious players. Just 50 entrepreneurial authors will be attending, and we’re looking forward to the three days with them. These are authors, speakers, and business owners who are serious enough about book publishing and business growth to plunk down the $2,500 per seat required to attend.

And as far as our fellow presenters … we’re blessed to be in the company of a hand-picked group of the most profitable marketing, public relations, and book publishing commandos out there!

Guerilla Book Authoring With Blogs

With Guerilla Book Authoring With Blogs we’ll be revealing how they can build traffic, grab top rankings, and grow their list while they are writing their book. Instead of the traditional methods of book authoring, the system we’ll be sharing will (more…)

If you’re a business owner looking to market with blogs, podcasts, and RSS — then here’s another cool tool to help your efforts to get more exposure. It’s called a Swicki! A Swicki is a new and very different kind of search engine created by Eurekster. It allows you to create deep, focused searches on topics you care about.

It’s a great tool for business bloggers because unlike other search engines, a Swicki puts you and your community in total control over the results.
It’s an ingenious social tool too that uses the wisdom of crowds to improve search results.

In doing some last minute research for our presentation at the Publishing4Profits Seminar this weekend I came across a terrific book publishing blog by Joe Wikert. After giving Joe’s Swicki a spin, I liked what I saw and followed his lead quickly creating our business blogging Swicki.

Three simple customization steps and about five minutes of adding the simple code to your site and you’re up and running. You can check out the Advanced Business Blogging Swicki over to the left under the “Search Tools” header (about half way down the page.)

Testing the Swicki Search Engine

If you’re like me you probably find a lot of good relevant material buried way down deep in the results from Google, Yahoo, or MSN. The first thing I noticed when I tested about a dozen different Swickis is that you can really segment your results and get real results that have the most relevance for people who are passionate about a topic.

From what Eurekster states on their FAQ page:

“Every click refines the Swicki’s search strings, creating a responsive, dynamic result that’s both customized and highly relevant.”

They’re not kidding! And Eurekster is willing to put it on the line and prove it. They provide (more…)

Here’s a ’short list’ of the best software options when you’re using blogs to boost your internal business growth, and/or for marketing with business blogs. They’ve all been tested and worked over well either by the RPM Success Group tech team, or by our blog coaching clients.

Here we’ve split them three sub-categories — free, self-hosted, and third-party hosted. (more…)

I recently read and commented on a business blogging case study by Thom Singer over at ProBlogger. In that post Thom shared about his growth and experience blogging for his business over the last year. He’s been using Blogger up till now, and he mentioned three things in particular that I knew would be valuable for me to address in depth here for other business owners who are trying to market with business blogs.

The three points related to marketing with blogs:

1. Blogging with YOUR business in mind
2. Feeling “stuck” with Blogger
3. Getting hung up on “regular readers” defined as RSS subscribers

I gave Thom a few tips in my original comments on both these points, but let’s get you some expanded business blog coaching here with specifics.

1. Effective marketing though your blog

First of all, since Thom is primarily focused on promoting himself and his business by educating his target audience, he’s got the right mindset. It’s great to see another business owner using blogs the right way — to promote THEIR OWN products/services!

This may seem obvious to some who are new to advanced business blogging, but we see far too many business owners get confused and taken off course with the advice/consulting of professional/full-time bloggers who make money of traffic monetization (AdSense, etc.). So don’t let any self appointed ‘experts’ make you feel bad by slamming you with some ‘rules’ of the blogosphere that you shouldn’t promote yourself, your products, or your services.

No! You should not be blatantly marketing or using any type of ‘hard’ sales techniques on your blog. That’s not the place for that type of copy, audios, or commercials.

Yes! You should be educating people about your niche and/or industry.

Yes! You should be differentiating yourself from your competitors. Not by attacking them openly. But rather, by sharing your opinions, your strategic approaches to problems, and offering creative solutions that highlight your passions and expertise.

2. “Stuck” blogging for your business over at Blogger?

Thom triggered what I see as a great opportunity to address publicly a question/concern we often get from business owners who started blogging over at Blogger and now feel ’stuck.’ Here’s his comments that served as a catalyst:

“I used Blogger.com as my platform solely because that was what the panelist had recommended (and because it was free). SEO to my blog and my web site went through the roof because I post 4-6 times a week. That has been a huge perk. Search engines like fresh content and regular posting is the key.”

Now, if you’re like Thom and you’re happy with what you’ve achieved so far on Blogger — you haven’t seen anything yet as far as SEO (Search Engine Optimization)! From the results we’ve seen with hundreds of business owners, I can say confidently that you’ve only scratched the surface when it comes to motivating people (in your target audience) to take action.

The right tool helps when blogging for your business

Although successfully marketing with business blogs is not necessarily dependent on a particular blogging software, having the right tools can be a big help. The WordPress community has developed more business/marketing friendly plugin modules than you can shake a stick at.( You can check out some of the best WordPress plugins for business blogging here.)

Fact is, when you see how much easier WordPress makes reaching all your marketing goals, you’ll be amazed. When it comes to capability to carry the weight of the results you want in your business, blogging with Blogger is like using a Ford pickup. Business blogging with WordPress like using a Caterpillar earth mover!

Moving from Blogger to WordPress

Moving from Blogger to WordPress is easier than most people think. You can do it yourself if you’re good with code and MySQL. Justin over at JustInsomnia gives a great overview of the steps you’ll need to take.

Or to make things really easy, (more…)

One of the biggest reasons blogging attracts the attention of business owners is because of it’s ability to boost search engine rankings and direct streams of highly targeted traffic. But it takes more than just setting up a blog and starting to post regularly to get results.You need to have a solid Business Blogging Strategy written out. And you definitely MUST have done your keyword research, have your Killer Keyword list, and be ready with the right strategies and tactics to apply on your business blogs.

With all that setting the stage for great results — there are WordPress plugins that help to optimize every SEO action you take. In fact, no other blogging software that you can use for your business gives you as much flexibility, control, and optimization as WordPress does!

And keep in mind that organic search engine results are just the first step in building a massive list and making more sales. You need to quickly an ethically grab the attention of people coming to your site through organic search results.

So here are four of the best WordPress plugins to help in this area.

WORDPRESS PLUGINS FOR SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and TRAFFIC CONVERSION

Search Hilite

Here’s a simple plugin for grabbing a searchers attention. But don’t let it’s simplicity fool you. It helps fulfill a critical attention grabbing step that many business owners ignore when blogging.

Study after study has shown that when a person is searching for a product, service, or solution (whether it’s through organic search results or pay-per-click ads) — the more related a site seems to be when they land there, the more likely it is they’ll take action.

When you’re marketing with business blogs, your target audience will usually find your blog through organic search engine results. The faster you can make your site/blog appear more related to the search term they entered, the more likely it is they’ll stop and spend more time. That time is critical for you to put high priority marketing techniques to work building your list (like name capture, report downloads, etc.) (more…)

Blogging for business is all about capturing the attention of your target audience and building relationships after adding them to your multi-channel (email, phone, an off-line) list. But you’ll never have a chance even get that far if your business blog is clunky, hard to navigate, or a pain to print content from.

There are hundreds of WordPress plugins available to help improve your marketing and list building, but all are not created equal. To help you filter those down to a reasonable list and get you started, here are the best ones to help you make your blog more user friendly and make viral word of mouth marketing easy.

IMPROVING WORD OF MOUTH and VIRAL MARKETING ON YOUR BUSINESS BLOG

E-mail to Friend

Let’s say a first-time visitor, regular subscriber, or client likes an article, podcast, or video you have on your business blog. And let’s also say that as they’re reading, watching, or listening; they think of at least one person they think would benefit from that post. If that visitor now has to find the permalink, copy it, open their email program to paste it, and then finally send it to their friend — forget it! That will rarely (if ever) happen!

Enter the ‘Email to a friend‘ plugin for WordPress. This plugin eliminates all those hastles and makes it easy for someone to impulsively share your content with others. This is just one simple step that stacks together with other strategies to boost your word of mouth marketing.

Since installing this plugin on several of our blogs we’ve had a noticable increase in subscribers (to our update lists and/or download pages) — and we’ve been able to directly link that back those new subscribers to the Email to a friend option.

To download this WordPress plugin, go to http://www.lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming.php and look for ‘WP-Email‘ in the list

Print This Page

This plugin makes it easy for visitors to print a clean version of articles/posts from your blog. This is particularly helpful if you will be using special series or reports with offline calls to action for clients or prospects.

If you’re producing great content, and it’s in the form of longer articles or transcripts for podcasts — this plugin is a must. You’re shortchanging yourself an your target audience if you (more…)

Effectively stopping comment spam is right up there behind admin efficiency when it comes to effectively blogging for business. As spammers improve their ability to spam through comments, trackbacks, and pings, they will definitely be sucking up more of your time trying to stop them unless you take some serious steps.There are quite a few spam filtering plugins available for WordPress, but here we’re going to share the ones that have been tested and proven themsleves the most reliable and effective.

Each of these plugins has be tested for extended periods on multiple blogs, and they’ve all performed wonderfully. After the plugin list below, you’ll find a business blog coaching tip that will share how you can maximize spam filtering on WordPress with a simple little trick.

So here we go! (more…)