5 Simple Tips To Turn Your Blog Into A Business

This article is guest posted by Matt S. An emerging blogger who posts frequently on his Tumblr Blog, creatively titled XeonFunk. You can network with him on Twitter, Digg and FriendFeed.

As bloggers we are all (whether we consider ourselves them or not) businesspeople. You may not realise it yet but like all businesses you probably have outgoings (to cover hosting, design etc.) and probably incomes (from advertising or donations). Though many of you reading this will be operating on a small scale at the moment it will help you enormously going forward if you get yourself into good business habits. So this is how you can learn to treat your blog as a business:

1. Go to Work.

Blogging is not such a simple life. You may believe, and this was certainly true of me when I started out in 2007, that you can sit in front of the TV with a laptop and write any old rubbish which someone is bound to like. It’s important to find a nice working environment which is quiet and distraction free so that you can fully concentrate on the task in hand. This will make you much more productive and give you more time to relax after work.

It may also be good to get out of the house. After all, it’s better for your family if you don’t mix work and home life. If you are really serious and can, rent out an office or try this. If you don’t want to, work from home but use an office space and make sure to separate this from your home life. Make sure you leave work by 6pm each evening and come home even if it is the same building.

2. Get to work on time, and then use it wisely.

If you intend to make money from your blog your will need to put in the hours. Set yourself a weekly timetable and stick to it. Within the timetable you’ll need to assign time for different things that need to be done.

GET TO BED EARLY - GET UP EARLY.

This has affected me from time to time when I wanted to do something but ended up wasting a day because I stayed up too late the night before. Even if you’re not an ‘early bird’ you should get up by 8, even if you don’t start working until 10. Here is a fantastic post regarding this issue from ZenHabits.Net: Benefits Of Rising Early

3. MIT – Most Important Tasks.

In Business deadlines must be met. If not you may face a slap on the wrist, disciplinary hearing or even get fired. The disadvantage of blogging is that you are your boss and so these things won’t motivate you to complete a task before the deadline and you’ll get lazy. If you blog with a partner or team of bloggers then discuss in the morning what you want to achieve during the day and by doing this you will subconsciously feel a bit of pressure because you don’t want them to know you have failed.

The majority of you will work alone however and you cannot get this pressure from others, you need to exert it upon yourself. Here is where MIT’s come in. As Leo of www.ZenHabits.net says, you should allocate yourself at least one MIT per day. This is not your sole aim of the day, but a task which must be completed. He also recommends

“Do your MIT’s first thing in the morning, either at home or when you first get to work. If you put them off to later, you will get busy and run out of time to do them. Get them out of the way, and the rest of the day is gravy!”

I would also suggest that writing this down on a chart first thing in the morning would help keep it at the back of your mind so that you are compelled to do it.

What is an MIT?

• Write a blog post
• Post 5 thoughtful comments
• Set up a social media profile.

4. Organise your ‘Company’s’ Finances.

This may seem pointless at first but this is another way of keeping your home and work lives separate. It may help you to open a separate bank account. I have 2 bank accounts. One holds my savings and one holds a smaller amount of money which I use from day to day and also use to top up the other account from time to time. My rules are that I don’t touch my savings and that I continue to add to my current account regularly.

I would imagine that many people (especially beginners) couldn’t or wouldn’t be bothered to take the finances of their blog seriously. If you are blogging for pleasure or enjoyment and don’t wish to worry about money perhaps this is not applicable, but if you see blogging as a career or a lifestyle (even if it’s only a little earner on the side) you should invest some time in this.

For most people, this will involve nothing more than a piece of paper detailing advertising earnings and perhaps a new PayPal account. But if you adopt this habit from day one you’ll be in control and aware of your finances and you can devote more time to creating magic with your pen. For some however, such as those of you who blog at sites like these; keeping track of money may be a bit more difficult.

Final tip: Make one sheet with two columns: the left for outgoings and the right for incomes. Make sure you control what you spend on your blog by balancing the left and right sides.

5. Quality not Quantity.

I will begin this point with a metaphor. Say you went to a shop with the intention of buying strawberries; if the strawberries had were covered in mould you definitely wouldn’t buy them and you probably wouldn’t go back there looking for strawberries.

The same applies to content online. No matter how many ‘strawberries’ you offer, you’ll get no sales if they’ve gone off. So instead of concentrating on chucking content out there, slow down. Seriously consider how many blog posts you can afford to write without compromising the quality. There’s no point in writing 3 ‘knee-jerk’ posts. Instead allow yourself to mull over what you’re going to write and get your conclusion set in your mind before you start, make notes if it helps you.

But I think the most important thing is to write the post carefully. Take your time without compromising productivity. For example, I wrote this post in three one-hour sittings over three days. This gave me plenty of time to consider my thoughts before I finished the post. There were one or two occasions where I disagreed with what I’d already said but because I wrote the post over a longer period I had chance to change what I’d written. Finally and most importantly you must check over what you’re going to submit.

Why does Quality Matter? Within this post alone quality has been displayed. Not by me necessarily but by those stories I have linked to. The better, more informative and even entertaining a post is the more likely it is to get linked to and recommended and all that adds up to more traffic to your blog.

I hope you found these tips useful and would encourage you to implement them. If you have any of your own habits to share please leave them in the comments. Thanks.

Posted on June 29, 2008
Filed Under Planning and Productivity | 2 Comments

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What’s Motivating You To Become An Entrepreneur?

Finding Motivation is one society’s biggest problems, people complain that they can’t find it when they’re carrying out a piece of work; this is of therefore a big problem. Especially in workplaces where people are counting on you to deliver the best material you can output. Where do you find motivation? People tend to get motivated to carry out tasks and complete given work when they have something they want to achieve by doing the work, some people like to refer to these as goals or incentives; but I think the word is over used and has subsequently lost its meaning over time.

Entrepreneurial Motivation, What Is It and How Do You Really Find It?

Entrepreneurial Motivation can be more difficult to find than your good old fashioned ‘motivation‘ on its own, because most of the time it’s a kind of motivation that needs to really be thought about and planned. Why? Entrepreneurial Motivation is usually long term, and that’s why it needs to be broken down into something more short term. This post explores three main motivational factors which influence people’s decisions when quitting their jobs; and how these reasons can be used as entrepreneurial motivation for the long haul.

1. Do You Want To Make A Name For Yourself? Be Yourself And Exude Confidence.

I find that a lot of people who ultimately decide to leave the workplace and go off to begin their entrepreneurial endeavors, are fueled by a passion for some kind of celebrity status or authority figure, in a particular field or niche. Personally, I think that this can be a very good type of motivation to have because there are always opportunities to feel that you’re actually increasing people’s awareness of who you are; and what you’re an expert at. This is especially true when it comes to all the social media sites and applications which are being released daily; you can constantly be marketing yourself.

2. You Want To Start A Business Of Your Own? This Is Your Driving Force!

People quit their job because they want to be their own boss and start their own company…This is their motivation and it can be quite powerful. Owning a business can be a double edged sword; we’ve seen so many example of people try and fail and in business it happens a lot. Successful business can be summed up in a couple of words, including that of planning, implementing, analyzing and optimizing; in addition to this: your service or product should be top notch and high quality. A business will only be great if you have a distinct passion for what you’re doing. Passion breeds creativity and creativity breeds ideas; most of the time - ideas breed better business.

3. Maybe You Want To Escape From The Cubicle? This Can Be Great Motivation.

Tired of your boss screaming at you? Frustrated with the cubicle in which you spend most of your day. Is the rat race getting to you? Ever feel like you could be doing something so much more rewarding and probably end up living a much longer life? All of these questions above are examples of great, long term motivational goals which you can use to motivate yourself to continue developing a business model and implementing it. If you have a sound business strategy with a solid foundation, your business is likely to succeed, every time you feel discouraged; just remember you could be chasing trains and catching buses.

Do You Have The Professional Attitude, A Winning Personality and A Room Filling Presence?

One thing you need to understand is that there will always be highs and lows…it’s only natural. Stress, pressure, money and time constraints may eventually affect you. The most important message to remember is not to give in to these short term demoralizers; you can and you will get over them. Think long term, think about the bigger picture, motivate yourself by recalling what you were and envisioning what you will eventually become.

This is where the professional attitude comes in. In everything you do, you should aim for maximized efficiency and productivity; if you have a construction crew carrying out work, ensure they know the deadline and that work being executed daily meets quality and standards as well as maintaining and sticking to a rigorous work schedule.

Your personality needs to be great, remember that you have the power to influence people by using the mood in which you are in. Strive to be bubbly, friendly and full of energy; this can only happen if you have a balanced lifestyle, an excellent state of overall general health and a great well-being. Your presence needs to be so big that it fills a room and motivates others around you to get the job done because your excitement and presence will rub off on the workers.

Posted on June 22, 2008
Filed Under Entrepreneurship | 5 Comments

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The KISS Principle: Using It To Improve Your Blogging

What is the KISS Principle And What Relevance Does It Have To Blogging and Social Media?

Keep It Simple, Stupid. I’m sure you’ve heard it around the place; it’s based on the philosophy that things should not be made more complicated or complex than they need to be. The KISS philosophy states that you should always aim to make things simple and present things in a simplistic manner; but then again, simple is a relative term to what is being created or developed. Regardless of this, the main aim of the KISS method is to hone in on the fact that you shouldn’t add something which is not required. As a generation of people who have shorter attention spans and absorb less information, the KISS principle serves as an integral part for creating a successful blog which attracts new readers all the time; despite the fact that people have narrowing attention spans.

Heading Over To Google.Com For A Simplicity Case Study, Why Does It Work?

Google is successful because they had a simple philosophy or goal to begin with. Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to gather lots of information from around the Internet and allow people to find the best quality information without having to sift through piles of articles, posts and content. The Google homepage is a testament to the KISS model because it’s very basic and fulfills what Page and Brin set out for. The guys at Google also wanted to rank this information using a universal system called Google PageRank (this is touted to be a complex algorithm for ranking Internet data). This was set into motion, and now pages with higher PageRank are more likely to show up in the Top 10 search engine results which Google outputs on default.

The actual KISS part of Google’s philosophy though is the simplicity of their service, on the homepage you have an input box and two buttons. That’s it; nothing else, except for a few navigation links at the top of the page if you’re changing between search type and account administration. This is where Google hit the nail on the head; it’s so simple, even a baby could use it. You type in what you’re looking for and it delivers; not only does it deliver, but thanks to PageRank it delivers the best and most targeted results than any other search engine. That’s what I call a classic example of KISS in motion. The marketing for this great service? Word of mouth soon took care of that.

How To Implement the KISS Principle To A Web Site or Blog, Get Rid of All The Junk!

The K.I.S.S. method is all about developing a simple formula which answers most of your audience’s questions or needs, quickly and efficiently. In blogging terms, this is simple, it involves removing all the non essentials from your blog and providing people with what they’re really looking for. If you use the KISS method, your site should have elements reflecting this. This means that any excessive, useless widgets should be removed, your site shouldn’t be too graphics heavy and your content should be visually and mentally fulfilling. It brings us back to the central point of what a blog is…it can be conversational, content based or corporate. Regardless of the genre, keep it simple, write the content, get the traffic and embrace the interaction. No candy coating or extra fluff required.

Should Blog Posts Be Shorter And Snappier or Can You Get Away With A Longer Article?

Just because the acronym says ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid’ it does not automatically mean that blog posts need to be two or three phrases long.  Simplicity is relative to what you are discussing; if you’re talking about driving traffic to a site or blog, most of the time you need to explain yourself well. You can get away with writing a longer article, it’s not a problem, just make sure that your sentences make sense, are cohesive and succinct. Basically your paragraphs should make a point, explain the point to a certain extent and close on the point. The ‘waffle’ I sometimes encounter whilst reading blogs is not required or wanted, highly focused sentences and reduced repetition are key.

People Are Seeing More and Remembering Less, How Do You Combat This? Branding?

I’ve read countless times that we’re seeing more and remembering less. Why? Well, some blame it on the media, the web, television etc…There’s no single reason for it; there are many factors which are influencing this. More importantly, how do you combat this common trend? If you follow my advice twinned with the KISS principle and make your blog as user friendly, unique and simple as possible; you shouldn’t have any problems here. The blogs that fail use a generic theme most of the time; and they don’t have any worthy written, video or audio material whatsoever (most have the generic re-hashed content, which I hate with a passion). Branding is probably the solution to this problem, have a recognizable logo, a good overall message, a custom site design and a firm stance on the issues and themes you talk about and the rest is left for the reader to make his or her decision.

Give Your Readers Reasons To Keep Reading An Article, Visual Cues, Text Formatting etc…

I’m always taking about this, and it’s an integral part of a successful and noteworthy blog post. Readers are not going to sit there sifting through your material; it’s your responsibility to make them look more closely. Using visual cues to entice your readers is an important thing to do. I found that when properly formatted, a post with a lot of images and bold, underline and italicized text outperforms a post which has little or no formatting. By formatting a post, you’ll get more comments, more community buzz, subscribers and lastly, but definitely not least, your readers will be happier, they’ll be able to find hidden nuggets of golden information. Think links, bolded text, underlined text, italicized text, indented groups of text, block quotes, bullets, numbering, images etc…

How To Seal The Deal And Get The Extra RSS Feed or Email (Newsletter) Subscribers

Okay, you’ve got your visitors, they’ve read the content, it’s been presented to them in a way that’s easy to read and take on board. What next? The logical step is to turn the visitor into a regular, and eventually a customer. I don’t use the ‘What Would Seth Godin Do?’ plug-in; but I do use a similar block of text below each post which amounts to the same thing. It sticks out to the readers because of it’s orange colour, but it blends in to the theme at the same time. This little stripe below each post used to be blue, now it’s bright orange (RSS colour); and this simplistic choice to change it from blue to orange, caused my amount of subscribers to increase almost two fold. Remember to really think about anything you put, post or add to your blog and ask yourself ‘Do I Really Need It?’ and ‘Am I Keeping To The KISS Principle?’

Posted on June 14, 2008
Filed Under Blog and Site Improvement | 9 Comments

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A Marketing Concept Often Misunderstood: Advertising

The Average Joe Phenomenon, Common Perceptions Of Advertising And Profits

If you asked the guy next door, given he’s not Seth Godin or Gene Simmons, they’ll tell you that the best way to get people to buy your product is by advertising it. They might even suggest you go and buy some ads on TV or in the local newspaper or maybe even the radio; and they’ll tell you that a lot of people will see it hence buy more of your product. People are still living in a world where they think they can make money and promote their business by simply advertising it…they’re wrong for the most part.

Yes, believe or not, you can still make a decent sum of money by advertising products or services; but why would you settle for one lolly in the candy store when you could have the whole store full? Advertising is a waste of money in many respects, you’re paying money for an advertisement where your conversion rate for turning viewers into customers is going to be very thin, as thin as 10% or less, that means you’re not getting value for every dollar you spend.

The marketing world is continually changing, it’s very dynamic, it’s not something you can always be ‘good’ at. It’s understood by many of the world’s best business brains that the way people live their lives is changing; and the only way to be a consistently good marketer is by having the skills to adapt to this changing environment. When you can adapt to this environment quickly enough, you’ll be a step ahead of the competition. The most important point to understand about all of this is that it’s not insanely difficult to be ahead of the competition - because most consumers are living in a world of their own, they’re under the influence of the average joe phenomenon.

Why Is This Average Joe Phenomenon So Prevalent In Our Society?

People can be really smart sometimes, and they can be really stupid as well. Let’s leave all the guerilla tactics for increasing that razor thin conversion rate when advertising a product alone. We’ll start off by looking at a family who enjoy watching television and grab the local weekend paper every Saturday morning. The mother and father are more interested in taking their kids to soccer practice than anything else; they do their regular 9 to 5 thing; come back home, feed the kids, get them ready to sleep. They really don’t know much about marketing or advertising. This is why false information seeps through to them and ironically word of mouth marketing take a wrong turn…

It’s obvious that someone, somewhere in their home started telling their friends to advertise; and advertise more to help their business grow. They see it being done on TV, in the newspaper etc…They automatically think - if so many people are doing it then it must work! It works, but it doesn’t work well. I’ll give families this though, they are becoming smarter, they can understand when an advertisement doesn’t work very well, and they don’t react to it at all. So, that’s a huge point against starting an ad campaign for your business; if it’s not a good advertisement, if it doesn’t convey a great message, if your ad is not remarkable, you can kiss those extra conversion rate percentages goodbye.

Seth Godin’s Insights About Permission Marketing and Interruption Marketing

Seth has a book called Permission Marketing, in it he explores several marketing concepts relevant to the society in which we live, as opposed the one twenty or so years ago (many people are still way back in their comprehension of successful marketing skills and techniques). Seth talks about the change in the way people respond to advertisements, on TV and the internet, he states that this type of marketing is called ‘Interruption Marketing’ and informs us that it is being responded to negatively by today’s generation.

Seth is right, and he goes on to talk about several other examples of interruption marketing present in our day and age. Why is he right? Simply because what he says is the truth. I know that whenever I go and watch television I’ll experience at least twelve or more ad breaks during the entire program…so you know what I do? I tune out, skip to another channel, go for a walk about, have something to eat until the show has started again. What lesson is this teaching you, apart from the fact that I like to eat? It’s teaching you that money spent on advertising is wasteful spending which will yield sub par results.

The Dot Com Bubble Burst, Many Companies Sunk But Some Sailed Through

If you go back twelve to fifteen years ago, you’ll find that people were paying crazy prices for simple forms of advertising on the internet. You had your pop ups, banner ads and other highly invasive forms of paid media. What happened at first? When these forms of paid advertising came out, it was a big thing, people were less knowledgeable, the internet was new to them; you could fool a large mass of people quickly and easily.

The problem arose when people started getting smarter, but it also came about as a result of the so called burst of the dot com bubble from 2000 to 2002. People soon realized marketers were trying to sell their products to them, get their attention and subsequently spam them; people started ignoring advertisements. The rise of technologies such as the pop up blocker materialized and advertisers started seeing a reduction in CTR and conversion rates (not only as a result of pop up blockers, but also as a result of people being less inclined to click on ads because they were ads). It was to be expected, the internet was a bit rough and ready then, people were less anxious about giving out their emails and more likely to click on ads.

Today, it’s a whole different ball-game, new age marketers (though very few exist) have realized people are reluctant to give out their emails. Marketers have seen that potential customers need to have a good reason to sign up and along with that reasoning, offering incentives is also a plus to grab their attention. People are basically polar opposites of the average user in 1998, tens years later, they are less likely to give out email and many can spot ads from a mile away and won’t even consider clicking on them.

Although the dot com bubble had burst; it was not completely deflated. There were various companies which battled it out in what seemed like a raging storm, a never ending fire, some businesses failed to ride the wave through; some persevered, fought the battle and saw profits increase gradually. We are now in the second dot com boom and many companies learnt a lot from the first one, no one can say if there will be a second burst of the bubble; but many people and organizations do make tentative predictions about the possibility of experiencing another one.

Still Want To Advertise? How Do You Succeed When The Odds Seem Stacked Against You…?

Advertising is not a useless tool, it’s just a tool which many people use in an ineffective way; hence a bad conversion rate for their products or services. People are smarter now, they know when they’re being pitched to directly, which is why marketers and internet marketers alike have had to resort to other methods to increase profit margins; and that all important viewer to customer conversion rate. In schools nowadays, we are still being taught what are titled as ‘the fundamental principles behind persuasive texts’, the problem is that what schools are teaching students is outdated information, which will serve no real purpose if the kid has prospects of developing a business in the future.

The most important factors to remember when beginning the development of an advertising campaign fall under three specific categories, message, medium, matter. The message is quite simply what you are trying to convey to the audience, medium is the way in which it is being conveyed and matter relates to why the person viewing or listening should continue listening; this involves giving the viewer or listener reasons to take action. In addition to the three categories mentioned above, advertising campaigns should be used in a medium where it is likely to have the best conversion and positioned at a time slot where people are most likely to respond.

There are entire books based on what a ’successful’ advertising campaign is and should be; the explanation above is a very brief, but highly accurate summary of the basic fundamentals required when modeling, refining and producing your advertising campaign. The reason why I still believe that there is more value in advertising or marketing on the internet as opposed to TV, radio and newspapers is because people are in their own comfort zone. They don’t need to get up, stop watching TV and go to find a web-site on their computers (not that they would); when they’re listening to radio, they forget most of the ads on it, unless a catchy jingle or funny phrase line is attached to the ad.

Success in advertising depends on the relevance of the ad to a specific group of people; and the likelihood that people are going to take action depends on how, when and where the advertisement is presented to them. The problem with television and radio advertisements is that people are not ready to take that action, they’re in the middle of watching something (hence Interruption Marketing, as defined by Seth Godin).

What’s Happening With Online Advertising? Is Ad Revenue Going Up or Down and Why?

The rise of internet activities such as blogging and easy web site creation has meant that more and more people are creating an online presence daily. There are some statistics that are truly staggering with respect to the amount of new sites and blogs created every single day. The internet or the world wide web is truly growing like never before, we have more people browsing the net and more people shopping online than there have ever been; and this is only likely to increase. Ad revenue is on the rise and will continue to rise as new sites and online properties are created.

Targeted Niche Market Advertising, The Key To Mastering A Successful Ad Campaign

The sheer amount of blogs and sites being created daily has led to an increasing presence in the amount of niche markets in existence online. This is where things get interesting; niche markets have three things going for it, that which you can benefit from: they are highly targeted areas of specific interest, they have a very loyal and supportive readership and they usually offer low cost advertising solutions. The amount that you pay at one of these niche sites is quite cheap in comparison to the amount you pay for advertisements elsewhere.

Since the readers of a niche market are already interested in other sites for that particular field, they know that the owner runs advertising; and that it is a fixed price advertising. Your CTR in a niche market will be considerably higher than in a mainstream media news site. This means that all you need to worry about is attracting those visitors to become your readers and future customers (which is easy enough to do if you offer RSS subscriptions via feed readers and email, a conversion form offering incentives is also very utile).

When Advertising Fails, Why It Does and How To Resolve This Problem

One of the biggest problems with advertising is that people don’t know how to use it effectively. This comes about as a result of many amateur campaigns which can’t really compete with other brands because the construction of their advertising campaign is not built on a solid foundation. When I talk about these ‘amateur’ campaigns, I am referring to the campaigns you see which don’t send out a strong message, the ones that haven’t really researched their market and the ones that can’t make a powerful appeal to a set group of people about their product or service.

Advertising can fail for many reasons, most of the time it’s because the person or group developing the campaign have decided on the wrong medium, the wrong message or the wrong matter or appeal for the advertisement. The single most important factor to consider separate from the three factors mentioned above is the choice of contextual and targeted viewers, if you are unable to find a large percentage people who are actively interested in what you have to offer; the advertising campaign will ultimately fail.

When Advertising Succeeds, What’s Done Right and How To Replicate Success

I present you with the TAO of advertising, Target! Analyze! Optimize! Welcome to your advertising success. Successful advertising is all about getting the right audience to see your product or service, responding to any questions or queries your audience may have and optimizing your advertisement and your product to meet your viewer’s (audience’s) requirements. People will make so many excuses to as why they don’t want or even can’t advertise. You’ll hear them saying things like I don’t have enough capital, I can’t get the right people to see my ad, even when I advertise, I never get more customers!

People say this because they haven’t taken the time to find out where their potential customers are, how to appeal to the potential customers and optimize their advertisement for maximum performance and conversions. If I want to get more readers to my site, where should I advertise? In my niche! I would start by going to other sites in my niche and buying the best converting ad formats in my niche; and this will help me to build my readership. When you’ve built your readership, then you can start crafting advertising for a broader audience and age group who might be interested in what you have to offer.

StumbleUpon and Facebook are fantastic outlets for developing a carefully crafted form of advertising specific to a type of audience. Why? It’s simple, they both offer highly integrated forms of advertising that allow you to get maximum exposure for your product. When I use the term ‘highly integrated’ I mean the form of advertisement doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb, and you’re not having to compete with other advertisers. StumbleUpon is great because you pay to advertise your site directly into their user interface, that means that as soon as they click Stumble they will see you site not as an advertisement but as what your site really is.

Facebook allows you to carefully target a select group of individuals in a specific age demographic twinned with the use of tags to identify the people who would be suited to what your product is all about (business, entrepreneurship, blogging, web design). Facebook advertising shines in the way it allows you to create an advertisement in very simple and easy to understand steps. Albeit not as integrated as StumbleUpon, it offers you a more targeted approach to advertising successfully.

The Future Of Advertising, Where It May Be Headed and What To Expect From It

I’m not your fortune teller, I’m not a psychic, but I can make some accurate predictions of what I think the future of advertising will be. We are witnessing a progression to more ’subtle’ forms of advertising, you’re starting to see cloaked forms of advertising, you have to look a bit closer to see that what seems like content is actually an advertisement. We’re all beginning to realize the importance of narrowing our target audience, targeting them in highly condensed niche markets and subsequently winning their support or loyalty for our products or services. I foresee that advertising will turn to making less grandiose appeals to an audience and start fine tuning their message, focusing on an effective medium and optimizing the possibility for target audience appeal to their product or service.

Posted on June 2, 2008
Filed Under Advertising and Promotion | 4 Comments

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Steps To Improving Site Usability And Functionality

Stop Now! You may be sending visitors packing with your blog design, and that’s not all, you are also reducing the likelihood that people will ever come back to your site again! First impressions are the most important thing, especially in this business where your blog design is representing YOU. Successful blog design has three essential concepts attached to it, cleanliness, uniqueness and content flow. If these three quintessential concepts are not met, you can be sure that you are throwing away at least 60% of your visitors or more.

Cleaning Up and Tidying Your Blog or Site Theme

• Ad Placement: You can have ads, but you should pick designated areas of your site to put them on and stick with those areas. Less is certainly more when it comes to ad placement, remove as the ads which don’t achieve a high CTR or those which do not convert well.
• Widgets: These are a continuous problem for most sites, they see a widget - they want it. They end up with huge amounts of widgets which make their site’s load-time skyrocket. Remove as many non essential widgets as you can; maximize internal links and reduce un necessary chicklets.
• Colour Scheme: Ensure that you are using a blend of colours that are not a bad combination. Your blend of colours in addition to your design should be something people remember you for.
• Social Media Buttons: Yes, it can be fun to use them at the end of a post, but make sure you use the ones that are of a reasonable size, huge buttons don’t make the post look any better and they take a very long time to load. In addition to this, put popular social media buttons, don’t include obscure social media sites which have very small readerships - this is pointless.

Giving Your Blog That “Come Back Soon!” Touch

• Buy or Design A Custom Theme: Buying or designing your own custom theme will allow your online business to become more than just a blog, it will allow your blog to rise above the rest. It will also give you an edge over millions of other blogs out there; you will now have a unique brand that will work for you - even when a site visitor has left your blog.
• Make or Hire Someone To Make A Logo For You: What does a logo do for your business? Let’s see, it gives you a unique identity, it sets you apart from the rest of some utterly disgusting web sites present online and it allows for a sense of synergy; helping to encompass what you stand for and how you are perceived in other people’s eyes.
• Being Open And Up Front With Readers: One of the biggest problems online; and especially when it comes to blogging is the fact that writers (bloggers) are not up front with their readers. This is especially true and it stems from subjects like affiliate marketing. If you’re trying to sell your readers something, tell them, most of the time, they’ll buy from you if you’re providing some form of incentive.
• Having A Relationship With Readers Is Key: This leads in from the previous point about being open and up front with readers. If you have a strong reader writer relationship you should be able to get a sale from them; you should have such a strong bond, that they don’t care if you’re using an affiliate link, you’ve earned them loyalty and respect, and they give you back theirs.

Helping Readers Discover More Quality Content

• Link To Posts From Within Your Sidebar: Your blog’s sidebar should maximize internal linking. This means that you should try and put more links to your own content thus reducing the likelihood of visitor’s leaving your site to go elsewhere quickly.
• Feature Your Blog’s Best Content: Maybe you’ve had a bad week, you haven’t really been bothered about publishing the latest and greatest content…Guess what? People will come looking for you! If you have a loyal readership, they’ll come to your site to see what’s going on; which is why featuring it is better than not doing so.
• Do It For Your Readers: If they don’t see any new content, they may simply decide to check out some of your previous articles…So be sure to link to them so readers can check them out from time to time - even when you’re posting frantically, they may want to find out about something a bit different.

If your blog can meet the above standards, it is already ahead literally millions of other blogs which do not seem to be able to grasp this concept. By following and implementing the steps mentioned above, you will be able to dedicate a large amount of time to writing more content as opposed to analyzing statistics, visitor data, traffic sources etc…Which you shouldn’t be wasting too much of your time with anyway.

“What Do You Believe Is Most Important About A Blog’s Design?”

Posted on May 27, 2008
Filed Under Site Development | 7 Comments

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