WEEK 37
LAUNCH YOUR OWN BLOG
One of the most effective ways to establish a presence on the Internet and build a reputation as an industry expert and trustworthy salesperson is to create and manage your own blog. A blog is an online journal of sorts that you can use to self-publish content on any imaginable topic—from religion and politics to cars, homes, insurance, personal financing, pet care, and anything else.
I have several blogs:
FlippingFrenzy.com to raise awareness of real estate and mortgage fraud,
ForeclosureSelfDefense.com to inform homeowners facing foreclosure of their options (and promote my book
Foreclosure Self-Defense For Dummies),
AboutRalph.com/blog (to let people know where I’ll be speaking, what I am writing, and where I’ve been quoted in the press),
PowerfulSelling.com where I offer additional tips and tricks on how to market and sell more effectively and where I promote my books on selling-related topics.
Blogs have three huge advantages over standard web sites:
1. You can post content on a blog simply by filling out a form and clicking the Publish button. Design templates apply the formatting codes for you, so you don’t have to deal with complicated tags that are associated with Web page design.
2. Search engines love blogs. By posting a couple of unique and significant items every week, you can expect to see your blog entries start popping up in search engine results on Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and other search sites.
3. You don’t have to create all the content. Blogs encourage visitors to post comments on the articles you post. The more comments your blog entries inspire, the faster your blog grows and the higher its profile becomes with search engines—without you having to do extra work. In addition, the comments feature helps build a community of users around your blog, and we all know that community sells.
Blogs do a much better job than standard web sites at feeding search engines what they’re hungry for: fresh, relevant content and links. While you may create a small web site and attract a small amount of traffic, a comparably sized blog can attract thousands of enthusiastic visitors.
BRUSH UP ON BLOG BASICS
Blogs began as a tool for anyone with a computer and a connection to the Internet to create and share their own personal diaries, journals, and commentary, but they soon evolved into sources for freelance news stories and editorial content. People with inside information or strong opinions could publish whatever they were thinking without having to be employed by a newspaper, magazine, radio station, or TV network. Blogging turned the power of the news media over to the people. This is still one of the most popular uses for blogs today.
As with most things on the Internet, businesses eventually started to tap blogging for commercial use. The popularity of blogs combined with their ease of use made them a perfect marketing tool for corporations, and the popularity of corporate blogging started to soar. Now, many businesses that have any sort of Internet presence have corporate blogs in addition to their more static web sites. Even Martha Stewart Living has a blog: blogs1.marthastewart .com!
Understand the Two Main Components
A blog requires two components to exist—a hosting service and blogging platform:
1. The hosting service is the computer on the Internet where all the blog’s files are stored. When people visit your blog using their Web browsers, they are looking at files stored on the hosting service.
2. The blogging platform is the tool you use to create and manage your blog. Think of it as a word processor for blogging. When you log into your blog as its administrator, the platform presents you with a work area where you can type and format a new blog entry, edit or delete comments that visitors have posted, adjust the overall appearance and layout of your blog, and much more.
Add a Style with Design (Presentation) Templates
One of the great things about blogs is that you can easily post content to the Web without having to learn or deal with complicated hypertext markup language (HTML), the codes that control the look and layout of Web pages. Blogging allows you to publish content by typing into a form and then clicking the Publish button.
The HTML and cascading style sheets (CSS) codes are stored in design templates (often called presentation templates) that are included with most blogging platforms. The design templates control the look and layout of your blog. You can choose from one-, two-, or three-column templates to apply an overall layout to your blog. These design templates also contain the codes that control fonts, type sizes, and colors; control the appearance of headings, bulleted lists, and numbered lists; and ensure that each page on your blog has a consistent design.
Perhaps the coolest and most convenient aspect of design templates is that you can select a different template or customize the template at any time to change the look and layout of every single page of your blog, without touching the content. Any changes you make are automatically applied to every single page of your blog.
TEST DRIVE A BLOG FOR FREE
To get a feel for blogging before you invest too heavily in it, I recommend that you try one or two of the free blogging platforms currently available. You can set up a free blog on any of the following web sites and take the company’s blogging platform for a spin to see what each one has to offer:
Don’t spend too much time or effort configuring your blog and posting entries to it. Although most blogging platforms do allow you to export your content so you can set up your blog elsewhere using a different platform, there is no point in wasting time fine-tuning your blog only to have to start over when you set up your permanent blog. In addition to the extra work involved, if you move your blog from one of these free services to its own domain (e.g., moving from
yourname.blogspot.com from Blogger to
www.yourname.com), search engines may lose track of your posts, and it could take weeks before they get around to re-indexing them.
CHOOSE A BLOG HOST AND PLATFORM
The first step to launching your own blog is to choose a blog host and platform. Although the companies that offer hosting services and platforms are too numerous to cover, your choices can be grouped into the following four categories:
1. Free, hosted platforms, like the ones I encouraged you to test drive, offer a cheap and easy way to blog, but probably don’t offer the flexibility and power you need for long-term use.
2.
Turnkey solutions are generally the most expensive, but they deliver all the benefits of a hosted platform along with the flexibility to customize the blog’s design and layout and choose your own domain name. An example of a general-purpose turnkey solution is TypePad (
typepad.com), which is suitable for both personal and professional blogs. You may also find companies that offer turnkey solutions for specific industries, such as Kinetic Blogs (
kineticblogs.com).
3.
Standalone platforms are for those who want to get their hands dirty and learn blogging from the ground up. You register your own domain name (for about $10 per name per year), subscribe to a hosting services (for about $6 to $10 per month), install the blogging platform, and start blogging. If you choose this route, I recommend that you go through a full-featured hosting service, such as Yahoo! (
smallbusiness.yahoo.com/ webhosting/), BlueHost (
www.bluehost.com), or InMotion (
www.inmotionhosting.com). These services can help you register your domain name and install your blogging platform of choice—most blogging platforms are free or charge a small licensing fee.
4. Remote hosting options combine the power of a standalone blogging platform with the flexibility of hosting the blog on your own domain. Both Blogger and Typepad offer these options. The blog runs on your domain and hosting service, but you go to Blogger or Typepad to post content and configure your blog. This way, you can avoid the complications of installing the blog on your hosting service. In addition, you always have access to the latest version of the blogging platform without having to upgrade it yourself.
Caution: Avoid the temptation to advertise on your blog. All content should be soft-sell, if you’re selling at all. Your primary goal is to establish yourself as a trustworthy subject matter expert. When you achieve this goal, consumers are more likely to buy from you than from a complete stranger.
EARN HIGHER SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS
As I revealed early in this chapter, one of the most significant benefits that blogs offer is that they attract the attention of search engines, including Google. You don’t earn a high search ranking, however, simply by installing a blogging platform and adding a couple of posts. You need to be more proactive than that. Here are some suggestions for giving your blog a higher profile with search engines:
• Post fresh, relevant content. You can read about all sorts of clever ways to fool search engines into giving your blog a higher rank, but nothing works better than being real—post relevant articles once or preferably twice a week.
• Concentrate on key words and phrases. When composing a post, make sure you use the words and phrases people are likely to search for when looking for the content you are providing.
• Tag your blog entries: Many blogging platforms allow you to tag your entries with key words and phrases to make the posts easier to find.
• Cross-market your web site and blog. When you blog about something related to your company, insert links in your blog entry to your company web site. Similarly, add a permanent link to your blog from your company’s web site navigation bars.
• Populate your blogroll with relevant listings. Most blogging systems enable you to create a blogroll: a list of other web sites and blogs that are relevant to the content you post on your site. Creating a blogroll serves a dual purpose: It helps search engines determine what your site is about, and it encourages other web site and blog creators to link to your site as a way of thanking you for linking to their sites.
• Add relevant links to posts. By adding links to the body of your posts (in addition to the blogroll), you show that your content is part of the community. If you read an article on the Web that you would like to respond to, for example, you can post your response and include a link to the article you are referencing.
• Add links to cross-reference other posts on your blog. You may have noticed that when you search on Google, some sites have a double listing—a main listing with a sublisting indented below it. Studies have shown that people click these listings more often than they click single listings displayed in the same list of search results. You’re more likely to obtain double listings if your posts contain links that cross-reference other posts on your blog.
• Contribute to other people’s blogs. Blogging is all about establishing yourself as a credible source, an expert, in the community in which you do business. By contributing to other blogs in the community, you prove that you’re dedicated to the community, not just to your own agenda. When posting to other people’s blogs, however, it’s even more important not to advertise or blatantly try to drive traffic to your blog.
Ralph’s Rule: The Internet has transformed the twenty-first-century marketplace into a place where reputation and word-of-mouth advertising are the keys to success. By creating a blog and populating it with fresh, relevant content, you can build trust and create a buzz that sells.