Top 5 Tips on Blogging for Business
I wrote previously about starting a blog in 2008. Since then, a number of companies and most of our clients have setup their own blogs. But some of them have come back to me with question - that they are not getting much benefit from their blogs. That’s because they are missing out on some key ingredients that make a successful blog? lyou getting the desired results from your blog?
If not, here are Top 5 Tips on Blogging for Business. Use them, and you will definetely see better results.
1. Create the Blog using Your Own Domain Name: Today, many blogging sites offer free blog setup - like at wordpress.com or blogger.com. So your blog could be called yourcompany.wordpress.com or yourcompany.blogger.com.
But the problem with this approach is that all the inbound links your blog gets actually help the ranking of these companies, not yours.
It is ideal to set your blog on your own domain - like yourcompany.com/blog or yourcompanyblog.com.
This builds trust for your company, and your domain, and you benefit from all the link juice coming to your blog. And there is another domain that will get listed when people will search for your company’s products and services.
2. Blog For People and for the Search Engines: When you write on your blog - don’t overly focus on the search engines - write for humans.
Do note that every bolg post you write is another web page - another medium for people to search and find you.
So the more posts you have, the more chances of ranking on search engines, and these posts create traffic to your site, and improve your ranking in the search engines. See more at our Search Engine Optimization FAQ
3. Create Keyword Rich Links in the Blog Posts - Linking back to Specific Pages on your Website. These keyword rich links will add immence power and ranking to your main site - driving more visitors. This is one of the key reasons why people blog - because it provides ways to optimize your site for search engines, and get keyword rich links back to their main website.
You can easily see the amount of traffic you get directly to your blog posts in your Analytics account. This alone can demonstrate the power of search engines in finding your content. So the more keyword rich it is, the more you and your site wins.
Recently, I have driven a lot of traffic to my site by providing keyword rich How-To Articles like:
4. Connect With Your Audience: You need to spend time with your audiencne - on and off the blog. Respond to commentors on your blog - ask them questions, and see how you can assist them in their problems.
You should also use Social Media Tools like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and provide avenues for your audience to connect with you.
See more on how to connect with How to Promote Your Facebook Fan Page
5. Be Patient, Persistent & Consistent. Blogging for Business does not achieve results overnite. You need to keep at it for 2-3 times a week, for atleast 6 months before you will see any results.
You can track the gains using your Analytics - the amount of traffic generated on your site - to see which posts are popular, draw comments, and what is your audience really interested in.
In Conclusion
I admit that there is no no magic formula to blogging success. But if you take these 5 best practices, and do them consistently, you can surely expect better results from your business blogging activities. Blog on!
If you have any questions on how to make the most of your blog, please contact BrandRich today.
All the Best to your in your Business Blogging…
–Vinai Prakash
Senior Consultant, Brand Rich LLP
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Link Love - Don’t Underestimate Local Links
Most often, people keep seeking links from overseas directories or article directories and submit to hundreds of sites in the hope of getting a higher ranking in world wide results.
Surprisingly, most of their customers are from the city or state they live in. So why go all over the world to seek links from afar. They may do little good to your site. With reciprocal links and links from obscure directories, there’s hardly any link juice that passes to your site anyway.
Instead, if your business is focused on serving local customers in your city, you should try to get more links from local sites. Not only will your site be found more readily and frequently, more link juice will follow to your site, giving it more credibility in local search engines.
Today I share with you one easy place to get links from - Local, and all Free… you all will love this.
Google Local Search - The most easy and reputable link to get is to register your business locally with 
Google. We do this everyday for our clients, and you won’t believe how easy and simple the process is. Previously, Google used to send a postcard to your address to verify it. So you had to wait a couple of days to get the postcard, key in the validation code, and get your site registered locally.
Now Google offers a much simpler solution. Simply key in your business address, and google shows up the Google Map with your location highlighted. Even if it is a little off, you can simply move the pointer to your exact location, and pin point the exact location. You can key in your business phone number or a mobile number.
Actually, you can key in multiple phone numbers. Once the address is done, Google Local then asks you to select a phone number to give you a call to verify you. I selected my office telephone that’s just by my side and clicked ok. The phone rang so quickly that I got spooked.
I must say that I had’nt expected such a fast response. I was thinking that maybe the next Monday morning, someone from Google may actually call me to check if I am still alive. But this automated verification asked for a code that I saw on the screen, and voila…. I was registered with Google as a authentic Local business.
Not only that, they asked me to select 5 different categories of products and services that our business provided. I was happy to supply this information.
Now take this thing too lightly. Once your address is registered with Google local in your city, Google will now try to show this info whenever someone is trying to find our business, or the products and services I selected while registering. Isn’t that great!
And one heck of a link coming to your own website.
If you need help in setting up this so that your Business appears in Local Search, do contact us.
Cheers,
Vinai
Principal eMarketing Consultant
Brand Rich LLP - Helping companies to be found in Search Engines easily.
How To Optimize Your YouTube Video
Given that YouTube is by far the 2nd largest search engine, it makes sense to learn how to optimize your YouTube videos to your advantage. Here’s how:
Keyword Research
One useful step people tend to ignore when promoting their YouTube videos is keyword research. It is important to remember that understanding the competition will help make your YouTube video stay relevant on the SERPs. Spend enough time identifying niches that belong to the industry terms you are targeting. Use the YouTube Keyword Tool created by Google to gather keyword data specific to people searching on YouTube.
Title, Description and Tags
If you want to rank your video higher in YouTube and other search engines, it is not as simple as formulating a beautiful title (although this helps). The same concept as ranking for search engines applies when optimizing tags.
Title: make sure your title contains a good keyword phrase
Description: The description should also contain variations of keywords but please don’t keyword stuff, and make sure to write the content in a compelling manner
Clickable link: you can also include a link in the description, to do that just add the URL (including http://) at the start of your description to make it visible
Tags: Just like with any blog post you can add tags to your videos.
Vlog about it on your website. Vlogging or video blogging is undeniably an emerging social media tactic. The marriage of blogging and video allows you to connect with your readers on another level. Create a blog write up about your video content, keep it short and straight, and then link to your YouTube url.
