Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

If you’ve even remotely heard of this latest technological innovation called “the internet”, it’s all but certain you’ve likewise already come to understand the benefit of the blog. See, whatever it is you do all day, you write about, others get to read about it, and by an economy of scale, some of them will consider you an expert. Pretty slick, assuming you actually know what you’re doing.

You have two basic options:

Go through the trouble of setting up your own blog or use a blogging service like the one offered to select buyers over at ITPWS.com. Do it on your own, and establish your own voice, but if you can’t be bothered to invent the mastery of the writing craft, maybe you should consider having it done for you, assuming, again, that you have a business that actually has a product to sell.

If you’re striking out on your own with a blog, and have all the inclination and none of the disposable income, the very best solution (according to every member of our staff, who have collectively launched almost a thousand sites) is WordPress.

You can download a full-featured version to put on your site for free (if your host doesn’t already offer it automatically) or use a scaled-back version on their site. It’s pretty good, interactive, and unless you want it to look like a seamless part of your own site, it should do the trick just about perfectly.

There are other sites with content management systems you might be interested in, such as PHPNuke, PostNuke or Drupal. Each of these are a bit more advanced than you’d need for a blog (and by “a bit” I really mean “a lot”), but if you’ve got the coding prowess or a developer handy to build them out, you can use these base installations to afford greater upside potential in the future. Of course, your native CMS should have that functionality, and WordPress can be configured (even if against its will) to do just about anything you can dream up.

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Monday, April 7th, 2008

Choosing a proper domain name can have a huge impact in terms of how it affects your position and ranking on the major search engines. Search engine ranking can mean the difference between languishing in obscurity or getting so crushed with traffic your host wonders what you’re doing right.

Some Critical Factors Your Domain Name (URL) should:
1. Contain key words, whenever possible,
2. Be as short as possible, easy to remember, easy to spell, and easy to share verbally,
3. A dot-com extension. Forget the .us, .biz, .us and other such extensions. When I tell you to check out Amazon, you assume it’s dot-com, and so does everybody else.

1. Key Words in your Domain Name / URL (more…)

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Monday, April 7th, 2008

Imagine a simple question: how does business blogging work, and a complicated answer article: business blogging works like this, and let’s work forward from there. I always try to answer the most common blog questions within a business framing, but when it comes to tech and integration, though I do my very best, it’s honestly just about anybody’s best guess. (more…)

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Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008

Once you’re running a company newsletter or business blog, you’ll have a face in front of customers you’ve never even met. Just like you dress for the business you’re in, you need to talk with a certain professionalism. The same is true for your written materials. It’s just one more impression you make on your customers.

I interviewed a vice president at Washington Mutual some years back, and I asked him about his fancy gold watch. It was a bevel-faced Concord, a $20,000 timepiece, according to him. I asked him why he would wear such a thing and he told me that 80% of his clients don’t notice a nice watch and couldn’t care less, but the other 20% do notice and do care, and it’s that last 20% he needed to impress. (more…)

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