How Blogging Can Help Your Business

April 16th, 2009

Not your typical blogger!

Many people today assimilate the term blogging with some unemployed guy in his mid-twenties, sitting in his parents basement typing away on his laptop. Do yourself a favor and get this thought out of your head immediately.

Blogging is one of the more powerful Internet tools available for both small and large businesses. It’s also one of the cheapest forms of marketing you can utilize after word of mouth.

So if you haven’t already started a blog for your business, here are four reasons why should you should start today.

1) SEO – Blogging is an easy way to efficiently add fresh content to your site. As you build up this content, it will be indexed in the search engines, and your organic traffic will grow.

2) Content flow – Blogging allows you to add content to your site in a random order via posts. This makes it much easier for you to discuss a variety of topics without feeling like it’s off topic for the page.

3) It gives people a reason to go to your site – If you build it they will come. By “it”, I mean valuable and interesting content. If people keep coming back for your content, they’re more likely to become your customer.

4) Get free market research – Thinking about implementing a change to your business, but not sure how it will be received? Just ask your business blog readers for feedback and suggestions. Who knows what improvements might develop just by asking “what do you think?”

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Your Business Card Is Crap!

April 9th, 2009

This is a great viral video, it’s just too bad that he never mentioned a company name or even his name for that matter. Or could this be an even better strategy, as now there might be a buzz on the Internet to find out exactly who this guy is?

Speaking of business cards, check out these other sites for some impressive and creative business cards.

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SEO Site Analysis: Gifted

April 9th, 2009

SEO site analysis

Here is a site analysis I have prepared for Gifted (http://www.madebymarie.com). If you would like one prepared for your business website, please visit the contact page.

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Business Profile: Gifted

April 7th, 2009

Gifted

Today’s featured business is Gifted, based out of Boston, MA. I happened to find them on Twitter, so you can add this to your list of reasons to use Twitter.

If you are interested in having your business or site profiled here, please visit the contact page and send me an email.

So, let’s get right to my interview with co-owner Marie Corcoran…

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DiggBar Review: Friend or Foe?

April 6th, 2009

Digg Bar Cry Babies

Last week Digg released the DiggBar which resulted in plenty of criticism. The most widespread complaints seem to be that there is a loss of SEO benefits for content providers, and also the DiggBar url is what will be bookmarked by the user, as opposed to that of the content provider.

I’ll tell you straight out, right now I love the DiggBar and here’s why…

Less blind Digging (I hope)

People are lazy and have no problem blind Digging a story based on a title and the description of an article. As the content provider, this has absolutely no benefit to you unless you hit the front page of Digg. Now with the DiggBar, there’s really no excuse not to click through for content that you’re interested in, because the DiggBar gives you everything you need (Digg button, link back to Digg, link to the post, the ability to share the link, and the ability to kill the DiggBar.

Your CPM’s won’t suffer

Even with the DiggBar, your site will still serve up ad impressions to the reader. I don’t know about you, but most of my sites have over 60% of their traffic coming from referring sites, and the revenue they generate is through the CPM advertising model. Essentially, I don’t care how people get there. I’m going to get paid regardless of whether or not the reader viewed my content in the DiggBar iframe.

You can ditch the Digg toolbar

I hate toolbars because they just make for a painful web browsing experience. I avoid them at all costs, unless of course it’s a toolbar that will increase my productivity. With the DiggBar, you’re essentially getting the Digg toolbar, but only when you need it.

It’s a URL shortener

By simply adding “http://digg.com/” before any URL, you automatically get a shortened Digg URL. If you are really lazy, you can even add the DiggBar button to your bookmark toolbar, and it will shorten the URL with the click of a button.

Take that tinyurl.com!

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