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Company blogs are long passed the early adopter stage of their lifecycle. But does that mean all (or even most) businesses should have a blog by now? Should your business have a blog?

Blogging has several benefits to businesses in a marketing and PR capacity, from direct sales conversions to visibility and exposure within your industry. However, it isn’t right for every business. To determine whether or not business blogging is right for you, you’ll need to evaluate those benefits along with some of the risks.

Benefits of Business Blogging

Business blogs can do a lot to help your business–to help you build an audience, grow your company, increase revenues, and more. Here are some of the specific benefits of launching a blog for your small business:

• You can offer company news directly to your customers, readers, subscribers, etc.
• You can provide customer support.
• You can receive customer feedback (free market research).
• You can network with colleagues, potential customers, and others in your niche or industry.
• You can sell products (or services).
• You can earn advertising revenue.
• You can build brand awareness.
• You can position yourself as an authority source of information.

Risks of Business Blogging

Business blogs can certainly do a lot of good for your business, but there are also risks. If you’re careless with a company blog, you can damage your professional reputation and even lose business. Here are some of the risk factors of business blogging:

• You can damage your company’s credibility if false or misleading information is published in haste.
• You can face legal consequences if posts are libelous or infringing on others’ rights (another risk from the ease of publishing without strict editorial control).

• You can turn customers against your brand if you don’t handle two-way communication effectively (such as deleting constructive criticism or becoming rude with customers through your comments).
• You can lose further credibility if you use a blog solely for SEO and not to actually educate, inform, entertain, or have conversations with your audience (publishing constant links with the same anchor text, posting keyword-stuffed garbage or content that’s practically illegible, etc.).
• You can hurt your overall productivity if executives spend too much time blogging and being engaged in other social media outlets while losing some focus on the larger objectives of the company (they can be a time drain).

How to Decide if Business Blogging is Right for You

For many companies, the benefits of a business blog outweigh the risks. Whether or not that applies to your company is up to you and your staff. One of the most important considerations before jumping into business or corporate blogging is whether or not you have anyone in the company capable of carrying it out.

Blogging isn’t a one-off project. It’s a commitment. More than that, it’s a responsibility. If you don’t have dedicated staff or contractors who can keep the blog updated regularly and be present to answer reader questions and respond to comments then your business probably isn’t quite ready for blogging yet. But if you do, kick off your business blogging the right way–through proper planning, just as you would any other aspect of your business. Every blog won’t offer every benefit. Decide what your blogging goals and motivations are, and work out a plan of attack before making that first post. That’s the best way to get the most out of blogging while minimizing the risks.

In some instances a site will gain so many natural links that little else matters in the grand scheme of ranking.  Let’s take a look at a handful of summer blockbuster movie sites to see what kind of attention, if any, was paid to their on-site SEO efforts.  And, more importantly, a close look at where they rank and if a lack of attention to on-site SEO matters much in the world of blockbuster movie sites. Read the rest of this entry »

Believe it or not, new people join the search marketing world every day.  Frankly, that scares me a little bit.  It’s not the competition or the potential loss of business that scares me, but the sources people are relying on to give them the “right” information.  That said, here are the top 6 most classic SEO articles that I suggest anyone new to the industry read.  And then read again.  Some things in SEO/SEM world haven’t changed much…and a refresher is always a good idea. Read the rest of this entry »

A personal brand used to be a luxury. It was for the Scobles of the world and something us normal folk didn’t need to worry about. Those days are gone. Today, building and protecting your personal brand is a necessity.

Your personal brand is your image on the Web. It’s the result of your established authority, attention, Google trust and the ever-so-slight manipulation on your part to ensure the best visions of you are getting the most attention. Building and protecting your personal brand is one of the most important things you can do to further your career and public persona. It’s even more important now that your Google Profile is ranking right up there with the one you created on LinkedIn. Thanks, Google.
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Analytics is a current hot topic among website owners.  Analytics provides measures or metrics to allow a website owner to evaluate the performance of their website.  When visitors move around the Internet they leave very detailed footprints.  With the right software you can analyze these footprints and understand better where the visitors have gone and what they did.

An immediate problem is that there is too much data on where visitors traveled to.  How can you ensure you use your time well on this potentially huge analysis?  A related problem is that analytics only produces data on visitors who arrive at your website.  Those who almost arrived but did not enter the website are not recorded.  This article will discuss the most effective way of using your time to spot problems with your website. Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone talks about using social media to connect with their customers and fans and engaging in deeper relationships and conversations. When meetings are done and it’s time to put the work, time, and energy where the buzzwords are, few companies are doing it, and even fewer are doing it well. One company who is doing it well is Starbucks. There are several elements to Starbucks strategy and in this article we’ll take a look at some of them. Read the rest of this entry »

Typically when building websites that target local markets most publishers, use population and income data to decide which areas to focus on. Getting access to this data is often very cumbersome and time consuming and will often miss important markets you might not have considered.
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No matter how much we can be frustrated with Digg nonexistent customer support and powered-by-few story selection, we can’t ignore the site.

Why? If you are an Internet marketer, you need to know what’s hot online. If you are a link baiter, you need to know what appeals to the public. If you are a blogger, you need constant stream of news and inspiration. And if you are a social media marketer, you need to be connected to power Diggers.

So accept this, Digg is still useful and monitoring it helps a lot (I wanted to say “is a must” but then thought many successful online marketers can still do without it, so not a must but very helpful).

With the huge number of stories submitted and categories to track it is not easy to monitor Digg and spend minimum time for that. So let me share just a few most useful tools that save time but allow you to keep an eye on Digg activity:

DiggTop

DiggTop (runs on Adobe AIR). What I really love about the tool is that:

• You can save time by not clicking through: you can get a summary of each story by clicking on it; you can also Digg the story and load associated images right within the tool.

• It has a plenty of options to configure for better monitoring and notifications:

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Twitter is recognized as one of the best viral marketing tools. So if you have a good post you think might go viral, Twitter is your best bet to attract people’s and ‘linkers’ attention to it.

One of the most important steps in turning Twitter into an effective viral marketing tool is to make the sharing process “smooth” – and a good Twitter button inviting nicely to spread the word can be highly effective.

Buttons That Encourage Readers to Tweet Your Posts

Wordpress Plugins

Tweet this! is a fairly popular WordPress plugin that lets users easily Tweet each post of the blog. It works like any social bookmarking button that allows to share a story with two clicks. It re-directs you to your Twitter home page and redirects a Tweet containing the post title and link; all you have to do is to click “Update”:

It also includes support for Plurk, Yahoo Buzz, Delicious, Digg, Ping.fm, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. Read the rest of this entry »

What makes image search different from text search is that people searching for images are most often looking for some entertainment rather than business-related or informative content.

What else differentiates image search is that image content is often subjective – you can ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ images; besides, more often than not you even don’t know exactly what you are looking for and what you want to find.

So here are some fun tools that turn searching for images into fun and also let you find you don’t know what:

Search Images by Color:

Multicolr is Flickr-based color search engines. With it you can mix up to 10 colors and select images matching the chosen color palette.

The more colors you choose, the more colorful images you get in the end:

Each search result has its own URL, so you can share it with friends. Here’s my latest pick:

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