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.

Web 2.0 is the next phase of websites that, for the most part, added the function of interaction between the website owner and the visitor of that site. This is what opened the door to a vast amount of opportunities for the website owner. Now, with the power of commenting back to the website owner on the website, there begins a “two way” communication between the website owner and the visitor. Blogs are most identified with the ultimate web 2.0 property. The are actually online “dairies” that carry on a conversation between the website owner and the visitor. Blogs have a built in function called “comments” that allow the visitor to register and enter feedback or a valuable comment to the site. After the comment is made, it is visible for all the world to see.

We attached a video below that goes into more detail of the concepts of web 2.0.

Here are some of the things you will need to focus on in order to maximize your blog.

1. daily posting of content
2. announcement of special discounts
3. monthly contests
4. new videos
5. new audio/podcasts
6. insertion of digital pictures
7. linking to other related websites
8. social media tie in (Facebook/Twitter)

Of course there are many more things to do with your blog but these are the most common items you should be concentrating on.

I highly recommend that you list out all the items you implement on your blog and think about how you can delegate some or all of these tasks to an assistant or staff member or even hire someone. You will find that even if you can outsource or delegate just a small amount of these tasks, you will get your blog to work for you by higher page rank with the search engines and result in higher visitor count, and therefore more sales from customers.

Blogs are definitely here to stay. They will outlast the latest social media sites and even bookmarking sites. Blogs have already replaced most conventional HTML and flash sites.

Blogs are very important going into the future because along with the attraction of new customers it gives you, but it also strengthens your brand. We don’t have to tell you how important it is to brand your business out in the “brick and mortar” world. You definitely know it is necessary for getting customers to purchase from you again and again.

To manage a blog can be information overload because of the many things that is capable of doing, but only with your hard work into it. If you haven’t already, start planning how you manage your time with your blog.

To avoid being overwhelmed, we suggest you put up a large whiteboard in your office and split up the tasks needed to maintain your blog. Assign the necessary people to do each task. Give a timeline of the items to be done and who is responsible to complete them. Always get feedback from your staff if there are “roadblocks” that prevent them from getting done. And lastly, get rid of tasks that are not productive. There are things such as checking your email 8 times a day, which is counter productive. If you check your email once in the morning and once in the afternoon would better serve your valuable time!

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.

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.

Enjoy the video.

Wordress began in 2003 when matt mullenweg and his development team decided to make an open source coded blog platform. By keeping it “open source,” it means that no one has to buy the code to make blogs….it’s free! Since it’s humble beginnings, in 2003, WordPress blogging software has been downloaded millions of times and now powers hundreds of thousands of personal blogs to multinational corporations around the world. The team of developers are dedicated to keeping up on the updates to make the blog platform even better.

Blogs were originally meant to be personal online diaries, but now they have the capability to full out content management systems. This is the reason large corporations are now using this as their foundation of their websites. There is a movement to go from outdated HTML websites to the blogging platform.

The one main reason why users are attracted to WordPress blogging platform is how easy it is to use. Gone are the days when you had to hire a very high paid webmaster to set up, design and manage a business website.

Once up and running, a WordPress blog can be maintained by a “non-techie” within a matter of hours. I have proof of this because I have personally trained my clients for one full day and from then on, they were writing and inserting their own blog posts and moderating comments like a pro.

WordPress blogging platform is also at home with experienced webmasters and developers too. Because this is an open source code, techno “geeks” can get inside the PHP and CSS code of this platform and tweak it to their heart’s content.

It seems that WordPress will “rule” as the blog platform of choice for years to come.

For more information, go to click here

Well the newspaper publisher certainly understands their responsibility. It is to work as a team to ensure the news is delivered on time and delivered accurately to their customers.

On the same hand, it is your responsibility as the publisher of your own blog to make sure you, as a team of “one” gets the blog content out in a timely and reliable manner. Now we all get “busy” every once and while and sometimes we cannot deliver the blog content on the schedule we originally promised the subscriber base. Every now and then your subscribers will forgive you and will still come and visit your site. But when it gets inconsistent and now your subscribers are not sure when you are going to add your next blog post, that is when you get in trouble. You see, your blog visitors are a fickle bunch. Once they get a feeling that your blog cannot be counted on regularly posted content, visitors will not come back. It is human nature. Also, you are not doing the search engines any favor! Search engines will not come back as often either and there goes your search engine ranking.

So, when you get to the point of not being able to reliably add content on your regular schedule, it is time to outsource content generation to someone else. You can go to many different sources to write your content for you, also having them insert the content to your blog. Whatever you can afford, make sure you add content at the least, twice a week. If you can post every other day better…..every day, is the best!

If you watch TV lately, interviewer Larry King, Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, President Obama, Politcal Columnist Arriana Huffinton, Singer Mariah Carey, just about each governor from each state of the union in the USA, and literally millions of famous corporate brand names have blogs. Do you know why? They know that blogs are the best way of getting the attention of their customers, their allies, their constituients, and attract new followers.

Blogs are here to stay. I predict that blogs will outlive Twitter, Facebook and many other social media properties out there.

Blogs currently are replacing all regular “old school” HTML websites. The ease of making changes to websites by non-techical people along with the “built in” code that “pings” search engines along with robust SEO attributes makes for the blog being the “power house” of website making.

Blogs will be relevant for years to come. The SEO functionality, the ease of use, the most flexible platform, all contribute to making the blog the main staple of any type of effective online site.

To be more realistic, manage your blog in the most simplistic way. You want to offer value and quality to the visitor but also don’t overdo the varied options they have to choose from. Less is more, in the design of your blog. Keep neutral colors in the design to be pleasing to the eye. Keep as simple and as low numbers, the number of navigation buttons in your header.

Keep consistent on how you post. If you post everyday, then keep posting everyday. If you choose to post once a week, then make sure you keep with that schedule. Whatever time you give to your blog, just make sure it is consistent. Your views will come to expect when you add content and continue to visit during your predictable schedule of posting content.

Managing your blog can be a most powerful tool you can use to attract a sizeable following.

Division of Labor

What a great concept. The bloggers write, the video people produce videos and insert them, the art and graphic department handles all insertions of graphics and pictures. If you have an “army” of people handling different parts of the daily responsibilites of blogging, it is no wonder they stay on top of the search engines and control hundreds of thousands of unique page views which, in turn makes boatloads of money with their blog sponsorships and banner ad rentals there.

What is a “CMS” site? As defined in www.wikipedia.org “A ‘web content management’ (WCM) system is a CMS designed to simplify the publication of web content to Web sites, in particular allowing content creators to submit content without requiring technical knowledge of HTML or the uploading of files.”

“Usually the software provides authoring (and other) tools designed to allow users with little or no knowledge of programming languages or markup languages to create and manage content with relative ease of use.” This is what blog software does.

“Most systems use a database to store content, metadata, and/or artifacts that might be needed by the system. Content is frequently, but not universally, stored as XML, to facilitate reuse and enable flexible presentation options.” Blog software is built to lay upon an SQL database within the webhost.

“A presentation layer displays the content to regular Web-site visitors based on a set of templates.” Most blog software allows for interface of weblog templates.

“Administration is typically done through browser-based interfaces.” Blog software includes an administrative panel to control the insertion and modification of content.

So, as you can see, with the above features built in, a full flegded website for a business can be constructed.