How is that you may ask? Well, I read a report called Tips for Successful Business Blogs
Where they reported some characteristics of successful business blogs. The data was gathered from “selected blogs from Adobe, Marqui, Microsoft and Stonyfield Farm among others.

After doing all the interviews, the research team identified five factors for success.
• Culture: If a company has particular cultural traits worth revealing or a bad reputation it wants to repudiate, blogging can be an attractive option.
• Transparency: Critical to establishing credibility and trust with an audience. People want to see an honest portrayal of a company.
• Time: It takes a lot of time to set up, research and write a quality blog. Companies need to identify a person who has the time or whose schedule is freed up to make the time.
• Dialog: A company’s ability and willingness to engage in dialog with their customer base about topics that the customer base is interested in is critical to its blogging success.
• Entertaining writing style and personalization: A blogger’s writing style and how much they are willing to reveal about their life, experience and opinions brings human interest to a blog, helps build a personal connection with readers and will keep people reading.”

All of these things contribute to building rapport with your customers. If your customers get a sense of the culture of your business, and they like it, they will feel more comfortable buying from you. If they sense transparency they will have a greater trust in your company, if they know that you or someone at your company cares enough about them, to invest the time, in well researched information on your blog, they will appreciate it and be more emotionally invested in your business. If they engage in a dialog with your company regularly, they will not only have a better understanding and sense of ownership in your company, but will be more likely to spread the word about your company. And finally if they are entertained by your blog, they are more likely to visit it frequently, which is surly better than if they did not.

ho qualifies for a business blog? Every company, big or small, public or private is a good candidate for a blog. In fact, many large companies are now turning to blogging as a key marketing initiative and are investing more into their blogs. In addition to the benefits listed above, a blog is also a great way to drive more traffic to your company website. For more information about starting your business’ blog, contact RF Web Studio or your web developer.

Using state of the art web publishing tools, you will be posting like a pro in the first hour. With absolutely no need for software or advanced computer skills. We will cover:

• Blogging for beginners, a ten step program to launching a successful blog
• Using Wordpress, posting, and categorizing information effectively
• Submitting to social networks that will promote your blog to millions of people
• Adding viral content to your blog that will attract loads of traffic
• Setting up plug ins and customizing your blog for maximum effectiveness

Since we have some work to do to get your blog set up registration deadline is April, 2nd. Register here. If you have questions please email russ @ rfwebstudio [.] com

Wow, what a great use of two hours of my day. Even as a self proclaimed blog advocate and SEO/SEM expert, I must say that I learned quite a bit. Here were some of the key points that I found most valuable:

• Balance your blogging life: spend 1/3 of your time posting on your blog, 1/3 reading other blogs, and 1/3 commenting!
• Never use a subdomain of a blogging platform as your URL, buy a domain and install it. (I told you so!)
• Funny and Enticing Titles work best.
• Posting weekly is “the norm.”

Some of this I already knew, but sometimes it helps my clients to hear it from other people.

I must admit that these guys seem to have a really good grasp of the benefits of business blogging as well as how it will help with your company’s website SEO. If you are interested, HubSpot is doing another webinar on Social Media Marketing, April 9, 2-3PM EST

Most of the time my post are inspired by something that I have learned, or something that has happened to me. I typically spend time researching the topic before posting. In many cases, I do not have “inspiring” events, take place every day. So then what is appropriate? In my opinion, two to three times a week is just about right. Of course there is no magic formula, so don’t feel bad if you don’t post on this schedule.

The frequency of your posts may not be as significant as how much you contribute to the blogoshpere. This statement may be confusing but let me explain. If you 100% of your “blogging” time posting to your blog, you are likely neglecting reading some other blogs, and quite possibly not commenting and or promoting your blog. I heard today in a webinar presented by HubSpot that you should spend equal time, reading, posting and commenting to keep your blogging time balanced.

So, with that, I am going to quit posting and start commenting on some of my favorite blogs.

Learn to the basics of blogging from Russell Fair, Owner of RF Web Studio. If you are a professional, product expert, or just someone with great ideas, you should market them. There are thousands of people every day looking for the answers that you have. Advanced workshops covering topics such as podcasting, SEO and SEM, E-Commerce and Email Opt-In Capturing, will be available if you would like to take your blog to the next level of professionalism. Please register no later than March 31st.

What you will get:

• Your very own blog, installed on your own domain name or as part of your website.
• The ability to post content to it from any computer, without any software.
• A basic knowledge of how to promote your blog in the Blogosphere
• Lunch

In addition to having my sidekick Brent Brooks from the Blankstage there helping out, we will also have two graduates from the last blogging workshop in attendance available as mentors.

The reality of the situation is this folks, YOUR NAME is valuable, but only if you brand it correctly. Think of some famous names, Henry Ford, Blair Singer, Suze Orman. What do they have in common, they are all known throughout their industry and the world perhaps as visionaries, as experts, as someone who is reputable in their field. When people think of great automotive innovator, they think of Ford. If you are curious about improving the sales in your business, you may think of Singer. If you want to know more about finance you may think of Orman. But the question is how did they become so well known? The answer is this: they write down their thoughts and share them with other people.

“All Fords are exactly alike, but no two men are just alike. Every new life is a new thing under the sun; there has never been anything just like it before, never will be again. A young man ought to get that idea about himself; he should look for the single spark of individuality that makes him different from other folks, and develop that for all he is worth. Society and schools may try to iron it out of him; their tendency is to put it all in the same mold, but I say don’t let that spark be lost; it is your only real claim to importance.”

Henry Ford

How can you brand yourself as an expert in your field? What is the one thing that you stay awake at night pondering over? What is your passion? What do you love most? Would you be willing to write about it once a week? If so, write about it online, on a blog. Show off your passion, teach people what you know, share with the world the fantastic stories you have heard of been a part of. Who knows perhaps some day your name will be synonymous with what you do much like “inventor of the automobile,” “sales expert,” of “financial genius.”

Happy Blogging

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First of all, Keep It Simple, at least give readers the majority of the info in the first paragraph, so they can quickly decide if they want to invest the time to read the rest.

Second, Use Consistent Formatting. If you are going to cover multiple topics, try to use a h3 or h4 tag at the beginning of each topic, so if readers are looking for specific items (that they knew you were going to cover because of a well written introduction paragraph) they can find it easily.

Third, Use Some Links to background information. In addition to giving the original author props, you also want to give readers the option to get valuable information about the subject matter if they want.

Stay Focused there is nothing more annoying than a blog post, that starts off strong, but wonders off into la la land and looses my interest.

Lastly, Keep ‘Em Coming, I always encourage readers to keep viewing my blog regularly, as I will be adding more about this topic in the future.

Keep it Simple

I don’t know how better to explain this. I usually encourage that blog posts not be lengthy dissertations or never ending rants, although I could think of a couple rants of my own. Giving readers up front, no fluff content is key!

Formatting

Using some simple formatting tags makes it mush easier for readers to find what they are looking for without having to read every single word. Imagine looking for the part about linking if this were all just regular type.

Links

Linking is one of the most important things to do in a blog post, as I mentioned above, it gives credit for original ideas but also sends links to other bloggers, an action you hope they return. Which will mutually benefit both of your blogs in the search engines and traffic. Check out Andy Beard’s post on successful linking if you need some pointers on what to do and not to do.

Stay Focused

Seriously, If I just clicked a link about blogging strategies, and I find myself reading about SEO relevance or Why not to use Flash in a website, I have de-railed. Make a seperate post about that stuff and give readers what they were looking for.

Keep ‘Em Coming

If I told you that this was the last article I would ever post to this site, would you come back? Conversely if I mention that I will be attending a class on blogging from one of the Bloggosphere’s most famous bloggers on February 6th, and I will be making a part 2, 3 and 4 giving more detail about these and other relevant techniques, you might just check in after the 6th.

Happy Blogging

First of all there was XML and RSS two technologies that made it easy to do a couple of things. Simply put XML made website code more uniform and more search friendly to search engines like Google. RSS or (Rich Site Summary aka. Real Simple syndication) made it possible for a web page content, especially blog content to be picked up and “read” by many other programs like Google’s blog reader and Microsoft Outlook to name a few (there are thousands). This allows people, not just web designers, to make websites, that people can easily subscribe to and read as new content is published. This sparked a revolution of how information is delivered to end users.

Blogs today:

According to CyberJournalist.net: On July 31, 2006,

Technorati tracked its 50 millionth blog
The blogosphere is doubling about once every 6 and a half months
About 175,000 new weblogs are created each day
There are more than 2 blogs created each second of each day
about 1.6 Million postings per day, or about 18.6 posts per second.

And in 2005 the estimated number of blogs worldwide was over 60 Million! Today it is almost impossible to guess how many active blogs exist in the blogosphere.

What does all this mean to me? Well, first of all, it means if you don’t have a blog, you should! Not having a blog in todays business world is like not having business cards, a cell phone or a computer. In fact it’s worse in my opinion. considering that there are millions of people searching the internet every day that you are missing without a blog.

I use wordpress, as you can probabally gather if you view my portfolio, nearly all of the websites I am publishing today are built on this powerful platform. There are a varietly of other blog publishing services avaliable, many of them free. For more information about how to start a blog, or have one developed for you feel free to shoot me an email at russ <at> rfwebstudio <dot> com.

Happy Blogging!