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If You Can Talk, You Can Write

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Many business owners understand that starting a business blog is a good idea. However, they are hesitant to start blogging because the last time they wrote anything was years ago back in school. They don’t feel like they have the writing skill to attract an audience.

Well, here’s good news if you’re one of those business owners.

If you can talk, you can write.

I got this saying from a writing blog years ago. Unfortunately, I don’t remember the URL or the name of the blog.

You Don’t Need to Be Shakespeare

A common myth in writing is that you have to have your grammar just right and you have to have a big vocabulary or no one will read you. This may be true if you’re writing for a scholastic journal or you’re writing a novel. But you’re not. You’re writing a blog on the web.

The web is an interesting medium. It started out without any commercial elements. And while many businesses have joined the web, the internet has also evolved into a social, interactive environment. Today’s Internet users are not just passive consumers of information. Instead, they are active participants.

They create the information and communicate with other users through sites like Myspace, Facebook, Blogger, and Twitter. Also, many users have their own sites, which they update in their spare time. Most of these people are the average Joes and Janes. They are not English majors or budding authors. So, they are not going to grade your writing like your old English teacher.

The most important things in blogging are not your writing skill and vocabulary, but your expertise, experience, passion, and willingness to interact.

This blogger has over 30,000 subscribers and he definitely is not the most polished writer. His grammar is off in many places. He writes in a very conversational tone. And many of his sentences are clunky and wordy. But he does have something to say. He brings experience and expertise to the table and people listen to him.

I know a blogger from India who has hundreds of subscribers. English is not his first language so some of his blog posts have bad grammar. Yet he has a captive audience because of his passion and consistency.

Write the Way You Talk

As a business blogger, don’t be afraid to write the way you talk. As you write, pretend you’re actually communicating to a specific person that would fit your target audience. There are at least two benefits for doing this.

First, it makes you more personal. It shows that you’re a real person. This build trust and trust leads to sales. Too many businesses are guilty of stuffy, corporate speak. This type of writing makes those businesses seem cold and impersonal.

Second, it lowers your writing time. I believe that much of the time spent on writing is second guessing yourself and over analyzing your writing. However, if you write like you talk, you can write much more freely. And sure, it doesn’t hurt to reread what you’ve written and edit and rewrite as needed.

Drastically Improve Your Blog Posts By Adding Images

Photo by ioillusion

A simple but effective way to improve your blog posts is to add images. This tactic will add a couple minutes to your publishing time but the rewards are definitely worth it.

Images do several beneficial things.

They invite the reader to keep reading. This is very important because internet visitors have short attention spans. Your images will capture their attention quickly and arouse curiosity (“Why did they use that image?”).

They differentiate your blog since most blogs don’t have images. By inserting relevant pictures, your blog will be more memorable than the other blogs in your industry.

They fit the wants of a visual generation. With TV and internet video, our generation is the most visual generation ever. We’re used to interpreting the world through video and images. I’ve already talked about adding video to your blog, but if you don’t have time to produce videos, images are the next best thing.

They add to the reading experience. Think about your favorite magazine. What would happen if all the pictures in the magazine were removed? It would make reading the magazine less enjoyable. Even books today have more pictures than earlier books.

Where to Get Images

Here are my favorite places to find images.

Flickr
Find free images at Flickr.com with the Creative Commons license. Now you can’t legally use the images with the Noncommercial license but the other licenses are fair game. Just make sure not to modify the photos with the No Derivative Works license. You can resize them but don’t crop them. And finally, satisfy the requirements of the Attribution license my linking back to the Flickr username.

stock.xchng
This site is one of the most popular free stock photo sites. It has many pictures to choose from. I’ve found that most of the images are under the site’s standard restrictions. Fortunately, these restrictions are not stringent. They allow you to use the image on commercial sites. You do have to comment on the image and let the photographer know where you used their image.

Changing My Ways

If you’ve been following this blog, you may have realized that I don’t have images on most of the posts. That’s going to change. I’ve started adding images on blogs I write for. I just forgot about this one!

5 Link Building Principles That Actually Work

Photo by sundstrom

Links from quality sites are the currency of the web. They directly send you traffic and they improve your search engine rankings, which increases your traffic even more.

However, link building can be a frustrating process. Most search marketers will tell you that it’s one of the most difficult parts of their job. Quality links are not easy to get, so here are 5 principles to help improve your link building efforts.

1. Target sites that link out.

Much of the frustration from link building can come from targeting sites that don’t link out often. If you target sites that historically have not been generous with their links, you will have a hard time.

Before targeting a site for a link, I look at their content and see if they regularly link to other sites. I check to see if they have a links section. For blogs, you can look to see if it has a blogroll. If a site doesn’t have many links to other sites, I don’t target them.

If a site does have outgoing links, check to see what kind of content their links point to. If you can create similar content, you have a great chance of getting a link from that site.

Also, I like to target blogs because blogs usually link out more than other types of sites.

2. Have a long term mindset.

Link building is relationship building. And relationship building takes time in the real world and on the internet. So, don’t expect too much too fast.

Profitable online relationships take time and effort to cultivate. But if you build these relationships, you won’t have to resort to risky tactics like “begging for links”. These tactics don’t usually work and often end up hurting your reputation.

3. Write quality content on a consistent basis.

If you want your blog to attract links, you’ll need to write quality content. Quality content can come in many different forms.

You can publish something unique and interesting. That’s always a good way to get links. Or you can cover a relevant issue in your industry that everyone seems to be talking about. A useful guide or tutorial is another type of quality content that works.

Also, consistency is key. Most website owners don’t like to link to blogs that haven’t been updated in a while. You should publish at least one blog post every 7-14 days. That makes your blog look alive instead of dead.

4. Get noticed.

Much of link building is just getting your blog out in the open. But you have to figure out how to do this without being overbearing.

Try contacting webmasters directly to start a conversation or give them something they would find interesting. Savvy business people have been doing this in the offline world for a long time. They will send an executive newspaper or magazine clippings. These clippings might be of an interesting article or a news item about the executive’s company. Or they’ll mail the executive a letter with useful feedback about his products.

To apply this online, find the website’s contact page and email the webmaster. If the webmaster is on Twitter, I would interact with them there by replying to their tweets.

With blogs, I would recommend leaving many quality comments. This will attract the blogger’s attention. They in turn will probably visit your site and hopefully, they’ll find something to link to. If you don’t get a link right away, you might get one later as the blogger might subscribe to your blog.

I talked about linking out as a link building strategy in my previous post. This strategy works because webmasters often visit sites that send them traffic.

5. Ask for a link.

If you’re applying the other four principles, you’ll have good success with this one.

But don’t ask for a link to your blog home page. Instead, write a quality blog post and point webmasters to that post.

Also, don’t be afraid to ask for a link. If you’ve gotten a webmaster’s attention and you’re pointing them to a quality blog post, they won’t be annoyed. Remember, you’re doing them a favor by giving them something good to link to. At the same time, you don’t want to overdo this as webmasters don’t like getting too many link requests. I wouldn’t send more than one link request per month to the same webmaster unless you know them really well.

Why Linking to Other Sites is a Good Link Building Strategy

I always get excited whenever I get a link from a reputable site. My traffic increases and my Google rankings go up.

Recently, I got a link to one of my blogs that surprised me. I had not really targeted the blog that linked to me. All I had done was leave a couple of comments. Also, I had linked to him telling my readers to check out his blog.

I checked out the post where he linked to me. On this post, he welcomed my readers and gave an overview of his blog.

This event reminded me of the effectiveness of linking to other sites to build links to your own site.

I’ll Scratch Your Back If You Scratch Mine

Linking to other sites, or “linking out”, works because of human nature. If you do a favor for someone, they’ll often return the favor.

Many bloggers understand the value of links. They know how hard it is to get links especially in the beginning, so they are appreciative whenever they get one.

Also, the web is now a social network instead of just a place to get information. The new PR for businesses is personal relationships instead of public relations. In this environment, a link is the equivalent to a compliment or a personal recommendation.

And just like in the offline world, if you compliment someone, you’ll probably get one back (at least in the long term).

I Thought Reciprocal Linking was Not Effective

You may have heard that reciprocal links are not as effective as one-way links. This is true, but what many people don’t realize is that a reciprocal link is better than no link at all. I’ve had one site that got a good amount of traffic and 95% of its links were reciprocal links.

Also, in the long term, reciprocal links lead to one way links because of the traffic and exposure you receive. Each reciprocal link is going to send you some traffic. Some of the people who follow the link to your blog have their own blog. If they like your blog, they may link to you in the future.

And don’t underestimate the power of word of mouth. Each person that visits your blog may know a blogger. If you have good content, they will probably tell their blogger friend about your blog. This often leads to a link from that blogger.

With traffic and exposure being the key, you’ll want to link to sites that get a lot of traffic. I use these two simple methods to evaluate a site’s traffic volume.

If it’s a blog, I check to see if they have a consistent stream of comments (an average of 5 or more per post).

Looking at the site’s Alexa Rank also helps. Any site with a rank of 500,000 or lower will probably send a good amount of traffic. Alexa Rank is not the most accurate measure of traffic, but for the most part, I find that the lower the Alexa Rank of a site, the more traffic it will send.

Finally, reciprocal links are definitely easier to build. This goes back to my first point. If you link to a site, that site is much more likely to link to you than if you didn’t link to it.

Other Sites in Your Industry are Friends not Competitors

Think of other sites and blogs in your niche not as competitors but as friends.

Why do car dealerships build next to each other? Why are the food shops in a mall located in the same place? To share traffic.

The same principle applies for linking out. There are no physical food courts on the internet. However, if you link out to the blogs you want to be associated with, you can setup a “virtual food court” and share in their traffic as they link back to you.

Over to You

How often do you link out? Have you received any links?

Here’s a Simple Way to Increase the Effectiveness of Your Advertising

Traditional advertising is dying.

Billboards get ignored. TV watchers skip commercials with Tivo. The number of radio listeners is going down as people just listen on their iPod to their favorite songs. Newspaper and magazine circulation is declining.

You may think, well, I’ll just advertise on the web. But typical internet advertising is not working as well as it used to.

People are becoming more internet savvy. They are becoming more “blind to ads”. They’ve begun to realize what ads look like so they’re not clicking on them as much as before.

For example, big, flashy banner ads used to be effective at driving traffic a couple years ago, but now a lot less people click on them. These banners ads were replaced by text ads. Text ads get more clicks than banner ads, but as the internet knowledge and experience of online users increases, these ads will get less clicks.

This is already true with younger audiences, since they’ve grown up with the internet. I have a blog that targets the 14 to 30 year old crowd. I have text ads in a prominent location, but I usually only get one click per thousand pageviews.

All these things tell me that people are trying their best to avoid advertising. And technologies like Tivo, iPod, and the internet have made it much easier for them to do so.

So, what’s a small business owner to do? You need to get people’s attention to generate sales. I’ve written multiple times about the effectiveness of blogging to grab people’s attention. But what about advertising? Just give up on it?

No, I don’t think you have to do that. But in a world where advertising gets ignored, you have to do your advertising differently to get noticed. Here’s a simple principle to keep in mind.

Make Your Advertising Useful

Yesterday, I visited MapQuest to get driving directions. On their driving directions page, they had this section at the bottom of the page.

The picture and text highlighted in red caught my attention, because my car was having problems and I was afraid of being stranded during my upcoming out of town trip. I clicked the link and it took me to this useful, informative, interesting article.

By adding useful content to their ad, AutoZone was able to get my attention. However, if they just had the typical “great products and low prices” spiel, I would’ve ignored them.

I like what Brian Clark says:

The plain truth is, great content is the most effective way to advertise online, because to be considered great content, it can’t look anything like what we consider advertising.

So, next time you buy advertising, ask yourself: “How can I add something useful to my ad?”

I’ve written before that offering expert advice on a business blog is a great way to promote your business. The same principle works for advertising. By adding useful content to your ads, not only will you capture the attention of your target audience, but you’ll also improve your brand.