Social media is the movement for conversing with each other through many channels on the internet. It could be from an RSS feed from your blog, interacting with many members from a particular social media site like Facebook, even exchanging referrals of products and services to buy through simple emails in your inbox. Whatever we think of social media, always remember the purpose is to connect with other people.

As mentioned before, social media is not a platform to sell on, rather, a platform to meet other people and start a two way conversation about likes, dislikes, philosophies, common interests, favorite sports, fashion, celebrities, etc.

When a group is formed or joined for the purpose of sharing like interests, you are experiencing social media at its best.

Your blog is a social media source as well. Blogs may be the only social media channel that will outlast many of the other forms of social media sites for years to come. Why is that? Blogs are a great source of content in all forms. Text articles, video, pictures, audio, profiles, calendars, events, it all seems to converge nicely with blogs. No other social media site can be used as a total content management system while serving as a hub for social media at the same time. And the best part of it all is that anyone can master the art of publishing a blog within a matter of hours.

Blogging will last for years to come so plan out and implement your plan on the content you want your blog to have and align it with your personality. You can’t go wrong because someone out there will want to partake in consuming what you have to offer on a regular basis!

When you begin your blog, you are starting a publishing business. If you never thought of starting a publishing business, now is the time. Not only do you run a business from your physical storefront, but now you are adding a publishing arm to your business, which is a good thing. By starting to publish a blog online, you have opened up a new channel of advertising your business in a most economical way. You have the freedom to format your blog in any you want. Take, for example, you can have a section that profiles the products you carry in your store. You can also add articles of interest to your customers in a separate part of your blog. Still other areas can contain discount coupons and ongoing contests to keep interest with your customers and also your online visitors.

Blog publishing is so easy now and the learning curve is as short as several days to be fairly competent with posting and adding other forms of content.

Blogging can be fun too. It is easy to teach your employees to handle your blog posting duties. Chances are your employees already have their own personal blog or are active on the internet, making comments on other blogs.

Not to be overlooked is the value you present to your customers when you blog. Most other successful businesses in your industry have a business blog and you cannot ignore the fact that it has helped these businesses be in the forefront of the industry just because of it.

Blogging enables you to have a two way “conversation” with your audience. You make a blog post and you allow commenting to your blog posts, which is the very essence of the Web 2.0 function.

Blog Header

The first thing you need to do is get a customer blog header designed. You can line up a blog designer from a referral from someone you know. If you don’t know of any graphics designer, you can go online and look for a “graphic designer” or “web designer.” You can also go to outsourcing sites like elance.com or odesk.com. You can make inquiry with the designers there who specialize in blog header design.

Blog Plugins

Next, you should add some plugins to make your blog function the way you want it to. Here is my favorite list of “must haves” regarding blog plugins.

1. All in one SEO
2. Contact form
3. Sitemap Generator
4. Related posts
5. Share this
6. WP backup
7. Feedburner
8. Analytics

Of course there are literally thousands of plugins you can add to your blog, but the point is, only add the plugins that you will actually use. Any plugins you don’t use, delete it off your blog administration panel. It takes up unnecessary space.

To get the downloads and details of these plugins, simply enter the names above in your search engine box and you will come up with many websites that you can download from.

Blogging has become an easy publishing platform that anyone can learn in a short amount of time.

In our next blog post, we will go over how to set up the general settings for your blog.

Domain Name

When starting a new blog, plan out what domain name you plan on using. The best domain name you could choose is your business name and also pair the business name with a prefix or suffix that describes what you do as a business.

Let’s say your business name is Awesome Cleaners, so if you are a neighborhood cleaners, a good domain name would be “awesomecleaners.com.” Let’s say your cleaning business is located in Phoenix, Arizona. In order to help get customers who live and do business near your physical location, you need a prefix or suffix such as: “phoenixawesomecleaners.com,” or “awesomecleanersphoenix.com.”

That is a very short lesson of how to choose the perfect domain name for your business.

Blog Hosting

The next thing is to line up webhosting services for your blog. You can choose some good quality hosting such as hostgator.com, hostmonster.com, fatcow.com, justhost.com, to name a few. Hosting your blog through these webhosting services average $4.00 per month.

Blog Software

The only blog software we use is WordPress. You can download this software for free at www.wordpress.org.

Installing Your New Blog

Once you get your domain name registered, go into your administration part of your domain account and “point the domain” to your webhost account. It usually takes about 5 minutes to accomplish this. You can contact your webhost support desk for assistance on how to do this.

When you purchase webhosting, make sure they have a feature called “fantastico.” With this function you can actually set up a wordpress blog software without even downloading anything from WordPress.org’s site. It is totally automatic. Again, in this case, you can contact your webhosting company and ask them for assistance to set the WordPress blog software up for you.

Once you get this software up and running and you have your blog up, you have some setting up to do. In our next blog post, we will go over the things you need in order to maximize the usefulness of your new blog.

We have come a long way since 10 years ago. With the advances in computer technology, the costs of  making a website has gone down dramatically to the point where a “non-techie” type of person can put up their own site for just hundreds of dollars, not thousands.

Also, we missed the boat over the years because putting up a website is not going to get you noticed by your customers unless you practice search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is the practice of inserting keywords in your site that is related to the words people enter in a search engine that brings up websites these people are looking for. In other words, just putting up a website is not going to get you noticed unless you do certain things to get it noticed.

Now, you can put up a blog site yourself with simple easy to set up blog software, and turn it into your main website. The advantages of doing this is in using the blog function of attracting search engines. Blog software by it’s very nature in the coding automatically sets up an RSS feed that search engines “crawl” on a daily basis. In other words, when you make a blog post or any other change to your site, you are simultaneously “knocking on the door” of the search engines and alerting them of your change. Every time the search engines visit your site, it helps get your blog site rank higher with the search engine.

A great way of reducing costs while gaining the advantage of attracting search engines is starting up your business website with blog software. Blog themes and custom blog theme designers are able to make a blog look like a very expensive HTML site that you would normally pay thousands for.

So, when thinking of revamping your site or even replacing your website, think of using a blog platform to put your site on and utilize the functions of a blog at the same time.

In our next post, we will go over how to start a blog site and turning it into a full blown site that looks and feels like a regular HTML site.

1. posting area
2. page area
3. link box
4. able to upload video and pictures
5. has a way to add plugins
6. able for visitors to make comments
7. able to change out blog themes
8. able to custom edit any part of the blog with html code
9. can time release content
10. able to attach social media to the blog

With blog technology constantly improving there will be even more enhancements that are standard in this platform. 

The best feature of the blog platform is that it is extremely user friendly. That means that if you, as a total non technical person, can learn how to blog within several hours at most. If you can learn to write and make a new blog post, insert a photo, insert a video, and moderate a comment, you have about 90% of the blogging process down!

What blog technology has done is also reduce the time and expense to get a website up. If a business owner wants to make a website, he or she can simply upload the software to a web host account, open up the program, select a blog theme, and within minutes can start filling the blog with valuable content.

Blogs have greatly replaced full HTML websites because programming them and re editing the content can sure be so time consuming, even with the most experienced of webmasters, it can be time consuming.

One of the sites we use to get royalty free images is at istock photo. This is a site that holds a vast inventory of pictures, sounds and video from just about any subject matter you can think of. There is a small charge for images for a typical blog.

If you are strapped for paying for each picture you insert in your blog, there is a site called Flickr that you can link a picture for no charge. The only catch is that you have to follow procedures on how to insert the html code that follows back to the Flickr site in order to grant rights to insert these pictures.

For easy instructions, check out the video below.

Contact management system as used for blogs and business blogs are defined as a website that has the power to enter information, video, images, downloads, and any other type of content that the owner of the site can manipulate and manage for the benefit of it’s visitors.

Blogs as content management systems became popular because it freed the website owner from relying, and paying high dollar, for services from webmasters. Quite often, you would be charged a very high amount of money for services that webmasters could do within minutes. Also, you would have to wait for a very long time for these changes to be done because most webmasters are known for not managing their time well!

Blogs have put the owner of the site back in power of their own site by simple administration panels that allow the owner to make changes and manage content within the blog all by themselves. This is the true attraction of blogs.

Now, everyone can start a blog and manage it themselves. Of course there is a little learning curve that comes with owning your own blog, but in the long run, for what you want to use it for, marketing your business, this is a dream come true for business people around the world.

When blogging, make sure you have a strong passion for what you are blogging about. This translates very well for a business blog. Make sure you convey the passion you have for your products and services to your readers.

The second thing is write on your content in your blog that attracts a certain point of view, a specific opinion or even contraversial topic. And, always include a call to action to get their name and email address.

Enjoy the video below.

First, make sure you know the purpose of your blog. In the case of marketing your business, make sure you know how you want to introduce your product and what elements you are going to have to further educate your visitors of your business.

Decide on your blog domain name. Make sure your domain name has your full business name within it. There are many reasons for doing this but the most important one is to identify your brand online.

Next, picking a webhost that is reliable and of high quality is going to add to the success of your blog site.

You must learn the basics of a program called “FTP.” It stands for file transfer protocol. This program will allow you, from time to time, manually upload files to your webhost in the event that you need it, such as adding pictures or sound to your blog site. FTP programs can be very helpful in your website management duties.

Next, you must decide on which blogging software to use. As you may know, I use only WordPress blogging software. It has proven to be the best blog platform out there. One of the best advantages of WordPress is the large amount of widgets and plugin software written by third party companies that you can add to your blog. Literally thousands of different add ons are available for your blog.

If you intend on putting up your blog for the long term, brush up on your writing skills. No, you don’t need to go back to school, just practice writing so that it is at least up to 5th grade reading level.

Lastly, you should get familiar with the administration panel of WordPress or your blogging software. In this area, you can control how the blog will look, able to write posts, moderate comments, add plugins, etc.

When you get a routine going with your blog, make sure you have a regular schedule for posting and making the necessary changes to your blog. This is necessary to get the attention of search engines.

Remember, the key to successful blogging is to add valuable content to your blog on a daily basis.

In this day of ADD and being so busy with personal life, it is often hard to concentrate on getting things done and just pulling back and enjoying the fruits of your labor. With business competing ferociously with getting market share, it is no wonder that anything ever gets done!

The one most important thing you can do is to put out your business blog out there, even if you think it’s not accomplishing anything. You would be surprised at how many people visit your site the moment it goes online.

I was excited over three years ago when I first put up my business blog, that people from around the world are visiting that blog!  Think of the possibilites of how much you can change the world with just your own blog!

With these functions that a blogger can now manage on their own, it has never been easier to put a website at a moment’s notice to market a business.

I find that many businesses today are putting off what they could be doing right at this minute. I timed the process of setting up a business blog from scratch and came up with 20 minutes.

Here is what is involved:

1. purchasing a domain name
2. purchasing a webhost account
3. point the new domain name to the webhost
4. setting up the WordPress blog software
5. insert the first blog post
6. insert a picture or video with the first post

All the above would not take more than 20 minutes to set up. Start up costs for the “do it yourself’er” would be under $50.

Of course that does not take into consideration of planning out the theme of the blog, what kind of business items to promote, and overall plan of growing the blog.

In the next several posts, we will go over the different things that goes into a business blog that will maximize your return on investment.

What is very important is to plan out, on paper, what you want the blog to do for your business. Of course, you need your core purpose, which I will assume it is to promote your business and your products.

Next, you should outline the things you want your blog to do, even if there is no widget that does that function. I had some clients ask me about some complex way to divide the viewers and to funnel, automatically all visitor statistics into email lists. Well, although there may not be a widget or piece of software that does not do that, it gives reason to hire an outsourcer to write a program specific to that need. In other words, don’t count any idea out that you want the blog to do. There is always some way to make it happen.

For many tools for bloggers, I usually go to several websites to find what I want. Here is my list:

Quick Online Tips

Weblog Tools Collection

Tech 2 All

Quick Online Tips

Of course, if you scour the internet, you can get more listings, but these are my favorites so far.

Blogs have added the capability to be a full fledged CMS or content management system. By CMS we mean that we can manage our content, whether it be a posting system or a static main website look. “Managing” content is the process of making changes to your site in the form of adding or subtracting text articles, pictures, videos, audio, and any other media that you may want to insert in your site. The coolest thing about a CMS system is that it is truly a user friendly interface for beginners and advanced users alike.

What all normal static websites have in common is a header, a sidebar, a main content area and navigation buttons. A blog has all that and much more. Blogging has come a long way and eventually I imagine we will see a full fledged “plug and play” or “drag and drop” interface that will make starting blogs in easy reach for everyone.

Now if you intend on starting a blog as your main website, you should plan out, just like a conventional website, what you would like to have featured on your site.

Contact information is a must. It should have a pleasant header design that is eye catching and easy to read is most effective. An opt in box, preferably in the upper right corner is mandatory to capture a visitors information and grow your list. An “about” page that describes the purpose of the site or tell something worthwhile about the blog owner. And lastly, a contact us page. People want to know how they can get in touch with you if they like your blog.

Of course the last and most important part of your blog is the posting area. This area contains all your blog posts or articles that positions you as the “expert” in your field or business.  Blog posts are the best ways of getting the attention of the search engines.

If you are thinking of starting up another website or a business who already has a main website, you should still plan on putting up a blog that can eventually become your main website.