By getting in the mindset that blogging is really a two way conversation between your business and your customers and prospects, the more you will be successful at business blogging.

1. You need to carefully plan out your marketing strategy
2. Use the social media. “Plug in” your blog to the social media sites that make sense to your business.
3. Join in the conversation. Comment on other blogs and make new online connections.
4. “Stand out in the crowd.” Have a unique angle or twist to how you present your product or service.
5. Create videos. Videos is only getting more popular on the internet and if you put out more videos, it will only lead to higher rankings to your blog.

We have a video that goes in detail what we mentioned above.

Quite often the higher number of comments on a blog attracts more people to make even more comments on that same post because now it is then perceived as a popular blog. You are helping the other blog become more popular and in turn, the blog owner may go to your blog and make comments back to your blog.

Don’t forget, when making a comment to another blog, you gain a one way backlink to your blog, which helps your blog go higher in search engine rankings, and you help make the blog you made comments on more popular. It is definitely a “win-win” for both of you.

But there is much truth in that. Blogging is not easy. Blogging takes dedication, focus, belief, and most of all “elbow grease.” Once you have planned out the blog and how it will represent your business, you should from that day forward make it routine to manage it on a daily or weekly basis. The blog becomes a living thing on its own to help promote your business and to make sales.

There is no problem in getting excited to starting a blog, because everyone is saying to get one. What they don’t tell you is that the same people who suggest you get a blog quite often don’t manage their own blogs very well either. They can be inconsistent at posting which, in a previous post here is a big NO NO. If your blog stands a chance at making your business money, you have to be consistent it the frequency of posting, to the insertion of videos and pictures or events.

This brings us to the point of considering hiring someone to manage your blog. What’s involved in managing a blog? Here are several things that come to mind.

1. Blog posting
2. Adding pictures (important for search engine rank)
3. Adding video
4. Updating events announcements
5. Commenting on other blogs (for search engine rank)
6. Measuring viewer results (analytic software)

Blog posting is obvious. Every time you make a post, you automatically “ping” the search engines telling them you made a change or addition to the blog. When the search engine “bots” visit your site to see the changes you made, it then adds to your page rank “points” and help you rise in the rankings.

Adding pictures helps with making your blog interesting. Who wants to look at a blog with all text only? The bonus of adding pictures is that you can “label” each picture with a word or phrase that applies to the niche topic of your blog. Great for search engine optimization.

Adding video is even better because most people upload the video to a free hosting site like Youtube and then embed the video player code back to your blog. You get search engine “love” and you also get the bonus of having your video on other sites that link back to your blog site, which counts for higher search engine ranking.

Updating events is most important, especially when you have a physical location. You announce your specials, seminars, discounts, “house parties” on your blog and attract more people to your event.

Commenting on other blogs gets you known with audiences from other blogs and valuable backlinks to your blog that helps with search engine rank.

By installing visitor analytic software on your blog, you can measure just about every metric there is and then you can make the necessary changes or additions to help make your blog more popular.

So, should you hire someone to manage your blog? Yes. Eventually you should delegate the above duties to someone else after you get enough experience at doing these tasks yourself. In the end, you will be more successful with your brick and mortar business from getting a blog to help market your business.

Someday, if you are bold enough, you many want to contact the blog owner that you make comments on and send them a request to become a “guest” blogger on their blog. This is extremely valuable if you want a strong backlink from a high ranking blog site.

Rule number one in making comments on other blogs….make sure you check the page rank of the blog you are interested in making a comment on. It should be a blog with a page rank of at least 4 to 6. These blogs will get hundreds, if not thousands of views per month. You want to leverage the power of other blogs that get way more daily and monthly traffic than yours to it helps your ranking go higher as a result.

If you do this on a weekly basis, you will be assured of moving up in the search engine ranking system within weeks or several months at the latest. After all, this is the reason you want to market online in the first place!

What is this two way communication good for? It is great for getting feedback on products and services of the business owner. It is great for solving a problem a customer is having with the product. It is perfect for customers to comment among themselves to share personal opinions of the business products or services offered.

Now blogs are only part of the communication chain. When you add Facebook and Twitter links to and from your blog, it becomes a complete conversation with people who do not even live near your place of business but is interested in what others have to say on any of these social media sites about your product or services.

Make sure if you have Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, that you offer a link to and from each of these sites so that visitors can visit all your social sites with just one quick click.

What is very profound about having these lines of communications set up from your blog and other social sites is that you are keeping up with all your competition that is already doing this whether in a limited way or all out.

Remember, if you are not blogging and participating in social media marketing right now, you are losing out to your competition.

On the website www.cnet.com they have found out that Facebook is planning on launching a third party commenting system that will enable subscribers to dive even deeper into the Facebook world of “walls” and post swapping. Facebook currently has a commenting system in place. For all practical purposes, you can see it in action when someone makes a post to their wall and anyone who is a friend of that person can make a comment to the original comment by the Facebook poster.

This new system will actually make Facebook a full blown commenting site by having its own login, publishing and most importantly sending this same comment to other blogs and other Facebook partner sites and media sites.

So in essence, it is a complete system of getting one comment out to many outlets as possible. Seems like a more efficient way of getting the word out. Just another way for Facebook to keep their subscriber base close and tight for years to come. The “jury” is still out on this one. Who knows what will happen when this new commenting system comes out. Will Facebook grab more eyeballs and loyal following with the commenting features it has?

WordPress blogs, just like this one you are reading now will certainly stay mainstream for a long time. Its functionality and user friendly interface makes it the perfect product for businesses and individuals and is already replacing many websites that were flash based and HTML static based.

Let’s see what kind of feedback this new service is going to generate. For more information on this story click here.

When making blog posts, remember to provide timely news about your product or service. Address the concerns of your customers and keep them interested in what you have to offer.

For those of you who have a “brick and mortar” business, remind them of reasons to visit your store. It could be a “gotta have it” sale or an open house or a value added in house seminar.

Customers love it when they can give you feedback on your product through a blog. They know that many other people will see this and make you proud or make you defend your position on something they have brought up.

Embrace communication from your visitors whether good or bad. When someone makes a favorable comment, of course you are going to leave it in and be very proud of yourself. But also leave a comment that makes a complaint, because that is the time you can make a comment right back to the commenter about how to fix a problem or how to make things right so that the public at large gets to see how professional you are at public relations.

In a sense, the two way communication that a blog allows IS public relations. It allows for your business to be in a favorable light and builds credibility.

Blog marketing is all about communications with your audience.

Let’s say you have a food blog and you search the internet for other food related blogs and there are some that you like and it has high visibility and has a large readership. You simply register on that blog to make a blog comment and while registering, you insert your name, your email address, and most importantly, the URL of the website/blog that you want people to visit when they click on your name.

Check out the video below for more details of this process.

The blog medium is part of the social media movement and will probably continue for many years to come. If your business is not blogging, you should start now.

How many of you have gotten these comments? Well if you take a closer look at these “general” commentors, a good number of them are spam comments disguised as praise to your blog. Here are two giveaway signs;

They are so general in wording that it does not mention your name, an intelligent response or reference to the content in that blog post or a good length in feedback to alert you that a real human wrote this. The second giveaway is their return email address. If the return email is a product name or a weird sounding name that any normal human would not be too thrilled at owning, then it is spam. Mind you, it does not have tons of links, refers to sex, or vulgarity or any other strangeness. The comment spam is getting more intelligent now.

So now, to rate your blog comments, just remember to read it to yourself and see if it makes sense to you that a real human wrote it.

Business owners often forget to do the fundementals of marketing, which is regular scheduling of marketing efforts and active selling of your goods and services.

Do your self a favor and examine what you do in the course of a normal business day. What percentage do you spend on bookkeeping, on site management, marketing strategy, actual selling of your product, stocking of your store, and so on. With you, as the owner wearing all the “hats” to run a business, do you find that you spend the least amount of time marketing and selling? I would bet that is a fact in your business.

What you need to do is to make a plan that you carve out some time in the morning to market and sell and in the nights, plan and strategize what you are going to do to market and sell for the rest of the week, and the rest of the month.

Promoting your blog has to be one of your top priorities as your marketing mix. Your online presence will become more important, especially into the future. If you have no brand online, you will be left out of the competition for your product or service because 99% of the rest of your industry is online. Some have a great online presence. Others have badly designed sites or have a site that has been ignored for years.

It is up to you to consciously promote your blog as much as you can.

Here are some ways to promote your blog;

1. Insert your blog URL in your email signature
2. When making business calls, remind your customers of your blog
3. Print out flyers and leave them around in your store with your blog URL address
4. Put your blog URL address on your business cards and letterheads
5. Register your blog with all the local directories
6. Search out other blogs and websites and comment or give feedback where you can and insert your blog URL address

This is only a partial list of what you can do to promote your blog. Just remember that when you stop marketing, your whole promotion stops as well. Get into a mindset that you are going to market frequently and consistently. This is for the long term. This is how success happens!

If you sell widets, you better have the word “widgets” in your post header often. This not only helps the search engines find your business blog, but it also gets your site higher rankings. The more posts you have about widgets in your content and post header, the more you will have more relevance to all search tools online back to your site.

Secondly, writing fairly short articles are the best. (We will use the term articles and blog posts to mean the same thing.) Writing an article that is around 300 words on the average is going to be best. You want to write articles with first time visitors in mind. If you were to write a blog post that is one thousand words, you may “bore” a visitor and they may leave. Keep your blog post brief and to the point. That will keep the interest of your visitor and the chances of them coming back is greater.

Lastly, getting comments on your blog is really not as important as getting visitors to read your blog. The one most important thing comments on your blog gives you is credibility. If someone who visited your blog took the effort to actually click on the comment button, it is a complement to you that you cared enough to write something that is interesting enough to someone else.

Writing blog posts to attract the search engines are good but you really should look at your visitor count. What matters is the visitor count, first time visitors, or “unique” visitors count is the statistic you should pay most attention to.

For some tips on how to successfully make comments on other blogs, check out the video below:

The moment you start up your business blog is when you should be making a list of other blogs that are complementary to your blog. For example, if your business sells golf clubs, you can make comments on sports related blogs. When you search out these other blogs, make sure you feel comfortable with the topics talked about and also make sure it is “active,” in that people are regularly posting comments.

Another important part of your research when looking for another blog to make comments on is the page rank. At the least, you need to find a blog with a page rank of 2 or more. The reason is you need to “tap” another blog’s traffic volume. It goes without saying that commenting on a higher traffic blog site is going help get traffic to your site.

Also, make a meaningful comment, it has to make sense and be relative to the topic that is being talked about. Too many bloggers get lazy and make a very short comment that is general in nature and obviously is not a “quality” comment. A lot of blog owners will delete these types of comments. They are almost like “spam” if they don’t make sense or are so short just for the sake of getting a backlink “credit.”

For blog commenting to be valuable to drive a sizeable amount of traffic to your blog, you need to dedicate many blog comments per month and eventually develop a large amount of comments on other blogs. I usually post on the average one a day, so roughly 30 blog comments per month. You will be surprised after a couple of months at the amount of traffic that will come back to you from other blogs in time!