CT Biz Blogs

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In the daily rush of things to do, blogs to write, and marketing strategies to mastermind, it’s easy to forget that you’re allowed to have fun, too.

In that spirit, I’d like to ask you all to pop on over to Sealed Air’s site, for the festivities on Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day, 2006.

These folks have found a fun way to promote their brand and their product. What a great idea! I especially like the simple, yet amusing, Bubble Wrap Personality Test.

Have some fun, and start thinking of ways you can incorporate fun and humor into your blog. Don’t forget that the idea is to make people want to come read what you have to say.

I’ll have a list of easy, quick ideas on Wednesday. Feel free to chime in here with yours!

I’ve been away for a few days on a client site, but I’m back now.

J.D. Iles, Lincoln Sign Company’s owner and blogger at Signs Never Sleep, was featured in an interview on Dave Taylor’s Intuitive Systems blog.

Dave writes on online strategies for businesses, and has a great book out (I’m reading it now) called The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Growing Your Business with Google. He also has a site about the Growing Your Business with Google book.

J.D. is a business owner who understands and uses the power of blogs to help his business grow.

Dave is a blogger and consultant who uses the power of blogs to share and demonstrate his expertise to prospective clients.

Both these guys are well worth taking the time to check out for inspiration, ideas, and examples of how to do it right!

Today I want to revisit Liz’s Successful Blog post about the Blog Review Checklist. This is a great resource not only for reviewing an existing blog, but also for organizing your thoughts if you’re just starting to blog.

You can read the entire article (it’s not long) at the link above. Here are my thoughts about Liz’s first point:

• Audience: What words would your readers use to describe your blog? What do they like best about your site?

One of the first things a new blogger has to think about is: who is your audience? What market segment, profession, role, interest group, are the people who you hope will read your blog. And, how are you going to appeal to that targeted audience? If you want to attract readers, you’ll need to have posts that people will want to read.

For example, with CT Biz Blogs, my idea was that my blog would mostly appeal to newer bloggers and people thinking about blogging. That’s who I’ve set out to attract as readers. Therefore, I try to slant most of my articles towards people who are unfamiliar with blogs, or who haven’t thought much yet about the “how-to” part of blogging. Of course, there’s always something new to learn about blogging, so my hope is that I can bring enough new info to interest even more experienced bloggers.

The way to build traffic is by first, having a destination worth going to. So when you write, think about what your audience needs to know. When you’re a blogger, you’re a publisher, in a sense. Even if you’re blogging as a way of marketing your services, it’s a different sort of marketing than buying ad space in traditional “mainstream media” (MSM, as bloggers call them). It’s marketing by conversation and by reputation, not by yelling “my prices are insane!” or by having a sexy spokesmodel, or by shoving brochures at them.

This is a good thing.

So, if you’re new to blogging, or if you’ve been blogging for a while, take a few moments to jot down somewhere who you’re talking to, when you write.

And then don’t forget it.

When you write a blog post, it’s good to include links to other blogs or site you think might be of interest to your readers, or that illustrate your point in some way.

But what beginning bloggers often don’t realize is that how you link is as important as what you link to. In other words, the text you make clickable can help you, as well as the site to which you link. This is because search engines consider links important, and the words in the link are considered to be what the link is about. We’re talking computers, automated “bots” and spiders, and algorithims here. They’re fast, but not too smart, yet.

So, if you have a link, and the text that is linked is “click here,” that’s what the search engine “bots” will think the link is about. Not very helpful.

It’s also important to actually have link text and not just type out the URL and make that a link. Just think, would someone use a search engine to look for “www.ctbizblogs.com?” No. Who needs a search engine to find a website whose address they already know? They’d be looking for something such as small business blog in Connecticut, or connecticut lawyer blog.

Now, this obviously helps out the site you’re linking to, because you’ve just created an association between some search terms, or keywords, and a website. This is what search engines live for. But search engines also consider that, because you’ve created a link, that your content is about that, as well.

So, by helping readers find additional information, you’ve given yourself a boost, as well as the site to which you link.

And that’s one small way to help build traffic to your blog.

As I wrote in an earlier post about not having time to blog, one idea is to “repurpose” other collateral you may have lying around, such as press releases, responses to RFPs, articles, or other informational pieces. It’s best not to use the whole piece, because blogs tend to have a more informal, conversational tone. But there’s usually some bits that you can either use verbatim, or as a spark for a new post.

If you’re going to copy a Word document into a blog, you’ll need to take a few extra steps, though. That’s because the commands that Word uses to format a document are not the same as the code web pages use to format a page or post. It may look good when you’re creating the post, but when you hit “publish” all heck can break loose. In some blogs, like Wordpress.com, Word can really mess up the template. Suddenly the pages look funny, with the sidebar at the bottom, or the calendar wrapping oddly because the text is wider than the template can accommodate. And even if you’re only pasting in a few words from the document, unless your font is the same as the blog font those few words will be in, say, Times New Roman, when the rest of the page is Verdana. Very untidy!

You can output a Word document to HTML, and then try to copy that, but the code is so encrusted with extra junk that you run the risk of really confusing your blog if you copy the Word HTML into the blog writing interface.

One work-around is to copy from Word into a text editor, such as Notepad, which comes with all Windows PCs. I’m sure Macs have something similar. And actually, I’ll bet there’s some cool way to avoid the problem altogether, on a Mac. Once you’ve pasted into Notepad, you can copy that and paste that right into the blog writing interface. The secret hidden formatting voodoo that Word uses, and which can scramble your posts, will be gone. Then you use the blog interface to re-format the post.

Another trick is to use a program such as PureText. This nifty, free application strips the code out for you so you don’t have to do the extra Notepad shuffle. Once you’ve installed it, just clicking on the PureText button will clean the text you’ve copied from Word while the text is still in limbo (otherwise known as the “clipboard”) between the copy and the paste.

It’s a little extra work, but it makes a difference in how the blog looks.

Integrated Health Management is another blog I’ve been working on with Valorie Luther, at Creative Concepts. It’s yet another WordPress.com blog. Anthony Gordon, the principal, is new to the blogging world, but he fearlessly leaped in with no coaching from me. Here’s what IHM is all about:

In a nutshell, Integrated Health Management prevention and disease management services align local physicians, health professionals and fitness leaders through a more precise collaborative care model. This supports the interests of employers, health plans, patients, and network providers to produce highly cost effective care for ambulatory outpatients who are chronically ill or at high risk!

Consulting services such as this need to be blogging. Expertise is a must in consulting, and what better way to demonstrate that than by writing posts about the issues in the field, the challenges potential clients face, and how he’s helped other clients provide better care.

Anthony is ahead of the curve, and I’m sure that as his blog grows, he’ll find that it helps him connect with clients, share his expertise, and build his business.

I love it when a plan comes together!

I’ve been working with Creative Concepts to create a blog for Matthew Cossolotto’s book, HabitForce!, and his workshops. It’s up and running, and I’ll be providing the technical assistance and blogging know-how so that Matthew can concentrate on the writing.

We decided to use WordPress.com for the blog — it has more features than Blogger in some areas, such as built-in anti-spam protection via Akismet.

Matthew is a natural at blogging — 15 minutes after I emailed him his login information, he had the first post, about his upcoming radio interview, already published. Part of that is due to WordPress’s ease of use for writing posts, but it’s also due to Matthew having a lot going on, a lot to say, and a willingess to try new things — to explore and experiment. As a writer, speaker, and teacher, he’s exactly the type of person who needs to have a blog.

It’ll be interesting to watch as his blog grows and becomes part of the blogosphere and I’m excited to be a part of that. Within the bounds of client confidentiality, I’ll share what I can, here.

As always, the Central Connecticut Women’s Forum has a lot going on — plenty of opportunities for networking, and the weekly radio show (available for download, too!)

• Wednesday open house: Tonight, January 11, 2006, there’s an open house networking event at Jitters Coffeehouse in Southington. Once again, I can’t go, but I’ll make it one of these days!
• Monthly meeting: The CCWF meets every 3rd Tuesday at the Aqua Terra in Southington. This month’s meeting is next Tuesday, January 17th. If you’re interested, you’ll need to reserve by this Thursday, January 12th. I can’t go to that either, this time (note to self: get priorities straightened out).
• CCWF hits the airwaves. If you’re in the listening area, you can tune in every Tuesday morning from 8 - 9 am, to 990 AM. If you’re not, you can still download the audio files. The WCTX calls them podcasts, but they’re technically not; podcasts are audio files that you can subscribe to (via RSS) and have automatically downloaded onto your computer on a regular basis. But who cares about technicalities — the fact is that you can download these shows yourself, and listen to them on your computer, or on your digital (MP3) audio player, such as the iPod.

Once again, if you’re in the area, I highly recommend this group.

And I promise I’ll find something the men can attend, too. One great group that I might join is the Greater Meriden Chamber of Commerce. They are an amazing, energetic bunch with many events every month which are usually free for members. You don’t have to live in Meriden to join, either.

While I know a few things about blogging and the technology related to blogging, I’m not an expert in marketing and public relations. However, I do know someone who is: Valorie Luther, who owns Creative Concepts, a marketing and PR firm based in Fairfield, Connecticut.

She and I have been talking for some time about how CT Biz Blogs can help her clients get up to speed on blogging. On Friday it became official — here’s the press release announcing Creative Concepts’s blogging service. Valorie will supply the overall marketing strategy and public relations expertise and CT Biz Blogs will be supplying the blogging services for her clients.

I’m very excited about this — blogging is an excellent way for businesses to do marketing and PR. And I’m looking forward to working with Valorie; she’s a very smart lady!

She also does a lot of event planning work. Here’s a link to her event planning weblog, Entertaining News.

We’ve got some projects in the pipeline — I’ll be blogging about them when appropriate, within the bounds of client and professional confidentiality, of course.

If you’re interested, the contact info is on the announcement.

And, if you’re interested in getting technical help with blogging, CT Biz Blogs can help you there, too.

Liz Strauss, formerly of Successful Blog, has started a new blog called Biz.erati. She’s busy imparting her thoughts and writing about business issues. This is a good resource for anyone in the business world (which is really everyone, whether they know it or not), but especially good for folks who are starting a business.

Liz is a lively writer, full of stories and ideas. She’s well worth reading and I recommend you check out this blog.

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