Join me for a free teleseminar with guest expert Debbie Weil – we
will be discussing business blogging – why and how

Session #1 – Feb 9th
The Basics of Business Blogging and why every business should
have a blog- Feb 9th – Noon Central – Special Guest Expert –
Business blog expert: speaker, marketing consultant & publisher
Debbie Weil – Debbie blogs at
DebbieWeil.com and .
BlogWriteForCEOs.com

You’ve heard a lot about Blogging in the media, but the
small business marketer and consumer is just waking up to
this powerful new marketing medium. Some suggest blogs will
change the way many businesses market and advertise. Don’t
miss the wave. Every time I hear someone talking about blogs,
I hear them mention Debbie Weil. She is a highly sought after
writer and speaker on this new medium. – Make Your Reservation

small business marketing

A reader recently posed this question.

John,

Do you think a blog will create more website traffic than simply
adding the same information to the website itself?
Thanks,
Take care,
Arnold

So, here was my answer, but I’m betting you bloggers who read my
post will have some great advice. . . care to comment?

~ ~ ~ ~

There are a lot of variables involved here, but my experience is that
the blogs are currently doing much better in terms of traffic for a
couple of basic reasons.

The structure of a blog relies on frequent updates. That’s why
search engines seem to like them so. Sure, you could just update
your web site but blog software makes it so easy. The current
trend suggests that most web sites will move to this type of content
management software for entire web sites.

The other thing that helps in the traffic category is that content
created by blog software is automatically syndicated to RSS
readers. Blogs also have the ability to create a regular community
of readers or subscribers, web pages just don’t do that.

Blogs aren’t THE only tool, they are just one more very effective
one. I think most businesses need to do a combination of things
including blogging.

local online marketing

You’ve got to love a good underdog story. Well, they don’t get much
bigger than Godzilla vs Mozilla (Firefox) I’ve been seeing a lot of folks
hitting my site with the Firefox Browser and I’ve been having fun playing
with it myself.

The coolest feature (although I’m sure power users will laugh) is the
tabbed pages feature. You can open 5 or 6 web pages and it sets them
up like file tabs so you can jump back and forth.

So I guess I’ve officially joined the Spread Firefox – Igniting the web
movement. Want to know more! Look at what PCWorld said today.

Firefox owns 5% of the browser market.

Blog directories let you tell them to come on down and feed on your
newest entries by way of something called a ping or pinging. It’s like
this little eletronic alarm that goes off when you make a new entry.

That way they know to visit your site, only when you have updated.
Maybe you know that, maybe you don’t. But I just discovered a fairly
new service that will ping somewhere around 12 directories for you
at once. Most blog software can be set to do one or two but you had
to do the rest yourself.

Now you can visit Ping-O-Matic and do it all with one click. Do this
whenever your update your blog and you will find that more and
more people begin to notice you.

Conference Calls Unlimited just sent me a very powerful
referral marketing promotion. CCU provides audio and web
conference services and finds that to beat through the clutter
of the Internet and PPC price shopping they can do much
better by way of referral – (lesson for anyone in that nugget)

CCU sent me a plastic phone card looking thing and offered
to personalize up to 1000 of these babies with my logo.

These cards, now emblazoned with my logo, are good for
one free conference call or web conference. So what do I
do, I slap them in the mail to all of my favorite customers
and prospects as a good will gesture and to further prove
that I lay awake at night thinking of ways to make their
lives better.

Oh, but wait, now CCU gets exposed to a whole bunch of
new people and they essentially borrow a bit of the trust
that I have built with my clients – It’s referral marketing
at it’s best and it’s a great approach that I’m sure will pay
for itself over and over. Creativity ain’t that hard folks.
Think!

referral marketing

Seth Godin’s latest project Change This is offering a free download
titled the Beginner’s Guide to Business Blogging. Debbie Weil put the
guide together and I contributed an article on blogs and traffic.

Debbie did a nice job pulling together a very practical guide for new
and old bloggers alike. Go get one and pass it on!

Everyone talks about Google and Yahoo as though they are the only
search engines out there. And that’s because in terms of traffic for
your web site they really have mattered most.

MSN has long played third wheel but all of a sudden they are starting
to make some real noise and, as far as traffic goes on my site,
showing up.

Some recent developments.
MSN Search
MSN City Guides
MSNs free blog service
MSN to add RSS

And, let’s not forget what the M in MSN stands for. Better start studying
up on MSN and what it has to offer. I’d start with setting up your own
MyMSN account.