A blog is so important to the online success of all small businesses that it can truly be called the real heart

Have we convinced you yet that your blog is important? OK, here’s why it is:

It is the heart or hub of your online presence, and is the bridge between your website and the social networks.

For service business owners especially, a blog is where you can demonstrate your expertise by regularly adding written, audio or video examples of what you do, and provide proof that it works. It also a place to announce new products or services in a non-salesy way.

It’s the place where you can build online relationships with your readers who, if you’ve targeted them correctly, are also prospective clients for your business. Your blog gives them the opportunity to get to ‘know, like & trust’ you much more easily than  short updates of 140 characters.

It’s where you can send social networking connections to learn more about you, somewhere that isn’t just a sales page. It always amazes us when people still do this.

When you publish a new blog post, you instantly create new material to use as informative updates and share on your social networks.

By regularly adding new posts you increase the occasions on which Google & Bing will return to visit your blog. This in turn increases your general online visibility and rankings in the search engines. It’s a vital component of your content marketing strategy as this excellent post by Ardath Albee shows.

If you have chosen a self-hosted blog then your blog is a part of the internet owned by you. Which is more than can be said for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc…… even if you do pay for hosting and buy a premium blog theme, setting up a blog is still an extremely cost-effective way to establish a professional presence online for your business. It’s also where you have total control over the content and are free to make as many changes as you wish, as your business develops and grows.

If you’d like to learn more about blogging, here are details of a short guide which may be helpful.

So, how are you treating the real heart of your business online?

If you found this post helpful, please share it by clicking one of the links below.

Every day, through the social networks, millions of people are sharing articles, videos, podcasts, in fact all manner of content by tweeting links to their followers, or sharing updates on Facebook or LinkedIn. From motivating quotes and funny cat videos to more serious information, we all like passing on items we think will be of interest to our contacts. Social Media has made this very easy to do and those who do it well are well thought of.

Sifting through many blog posts and websites to eliminate the dross and only sharing the best is being thoughtful. It also helps to establish your reputation as a reliable source of good, timely information. I tend to leave sharing ‘big name’ news to others, and research a little deeper for articles I believe will be helpful to my social media connections. Their feedback tells me they like my links.

Curation Tools to use

As you might imagine there are a growing number of curation tools available to use, depending on your needs. This post and video from Mari Smith provide an excellent introduction to the subject.

Before content curation became more well known, my favourite sharing tool was delicious – which was simple and effective (but I stopped using it after reading it was to be abandoned by Yahoo! just over a year ago).

I briefly dallied with paper.li as a way to automatically curate by choosing and publishing each day using feeds from my various subscriptions, but I found the stories it included were far too random and so discontinued it.

Alltop is a great source of latest blog posts and top stories that you can personalise for the topics in which you are most interested.

How curation can help your blog

Do you find it a struggle to know what to blog about? I know I do at times. I worry about finding something new and interesting to write about after over 4 years of regular weekly blogging. But somehow a new post is created and shared each week. One of the things I do that helps is to regularly read other people’s blogs, and get inspiration from them. For example, because I knew I’d be writing about content curation this week (from our Blogging Calendar), I had been on the lookout for articles about it and collected several (using Evernote) in readiness. In effect I curated that content.

Content curation can also help you to produce blog posts by using content that isn’t yours! But before you rush off and collect articles & videos with cheerful abandon, there are a few etiquette points to be aware of.

• You will still need to create your own, original content if you want people to take notice of your thoughts & ideas.
• Make sure to give full attribution to the original source.
• Don’t just copy and paste whole blog posts or articles – that’s just lazy and will annoy people.
• Don’t publish posts full of links to influential websites in an attempt to increase your SEO rankings – Google won’t take any notice.

Do you curate content? If so, what sort of content and using which tools? Please share in the comments below.

This post is long overdue as I’ve been using Buffer for several months now

You’ll already know that between us, Sam and I read an awful lot of blog posts and visit many websites during the course of each day. When we come across articles or websites we think will be of interest to our Twitter followers, we like to share with them.

Now, we could use the sharing buttons already on the website, the Feedly ‘mini’ button or the ‘Hootlet’ bookmarking tool from Hootsuite, but here’s why we sometimes prefer to use Buffer.

If you’re anything like us, you probably do most of your online reading in the morning or perhaps wait until the evening. Tweeting out everything you want to share means that your followers will see lots of tweets sent out very close together, followed by a long gap with none.

Fortunately Buffer changes all that

Within your account settings you can specify exactly when you want the next tweet you place in your buffer to go out. Let’s say you want a buffer tweet to be sent out every hour, you can preschedule the exact time for each one (provided you have something saved in your buffer of course!).

You can arrange your settings to reflect the appropriate time zone and also select which days you want to tweet. I prefer not to send out buffer tweets over the weekend (a purely personal choice).

How do you add tweets to your buffer?

You simply install a little ‘add on’ icon in your browser bookmark toolbar (from the ‘Goodies’ page). Then, when you come across something you want to share, just click on the icon and Buffer will write the tweet for you (usually article title, website name plus a trackable link). Each tweet is fully customisable. I like to prefix mine with ‘Reading:’ ‘Great Post:’, ‘Interesting:’, or something similar. When you’re happy with the wording, click ‘Add to Buffer’ and that’s all there is to it! If you want to rearrange the schedule, it’s a simple case of dragging & dropping the relevant tweets to your liking.

Once you sign up for your own free Buffer account you automatically have 10 tweets you can place in your buffer. By referring friends to also sign up (using the special link Buffer gives you, like this one: http://bufferapp.com/r/8b44f ), you can ‘earn’ an extra tweet for each person who does.

Not only have I been impressed by the functionality of Buffer, the customer service has been excellent too. Soon after I first signed up for my free account, I had a few problems getting it to work properly. The automated welcome email invited me to contact co-founder @JoelGasgoigne with any feedback, so I hit reply and let him know about the problem. The speed of response and resolution of my query were a customer service delight! In fact, I think I was probably more impressed than if Buffer had worked perfectly first time

Do you use Buffer? If so, what’s your favourite feature? Please share!

Do you share what you find online?

We realise that we can’t know it all: the marketing possibilities for businesses keep changing as the internet continues to evolve at an ever-increasing pace. We don’t pretend to be ‘gurus’ or ‘experts’ (how I loathe those terms!). Instead we share what has already been written or recorded by specialists on topics that we hope will be of interest to you, and help you develop your business online.

However, there is a difference between sharing random links to the latest viral cat (or dog!) video on YouTube and engaging in what is known as ‘Content Curation’.

It establishes you as an authority in your field

Once you decide what specialist area you will focus on, looking out for relevant material becomes much easier. As you share the timely and useful content you find, your online followers will hopefully begin to realise that they need to read/watch/listen to what you’re sharing in order to be kept up to date.

It is a generous thing to do

Most of the people you meet online are incredibly generous in sharing not only their own stuff, but other people’s material too. Just as with traditional networking, the ‘givers gain’ philosophy (from BNI’s founder Ivan Misner) also holds true on the internet. The more you share, the more other people will feel inclined to share your material in return. If you share without expecting any reciprocation, it’s a nice surprise when they do.

It means you don’t have to always think up new material yourself

For some of us, it can be difficult to keep coming up with new ideas to ‘feed’ the blog and our other online sites. Content curation, if done regularly and systematically, will make it easier. You’ll be able to see what topics are ‘trending’ in your specialist area, offer the latest news and add your opinion too.

Content Curation can be done in several ways, using some of the variety of online tools available. Rather than list them all here, take a look at the following posts that we believe explain the details of curating your own content very well.

8 Ways to Find Great Social Media Content

Robert Scoble on Online Curation (video)

Social Media Gold Lies in the Inner Circle 

Are you a content curator? If so, let us know how you do it – and share which specialist area you cover – in the comments below.

We never liked the .html at the end of the links and also wanted to get rid of the dates in the links too. The reason we kept the old format when we moved was so we didn’t lose any initial rankings we had, but looking back, it would have been a lot easier to change the permalinks back then as there were far less posts and we might as well have changed everything at the same time (e.g gone the whole hog with moving the site). As an aside, don’t change the urls on your site for the sake of it, only if you have good reason for doing so (although you could argue that perhaps we could have lived with our old permalinks!).

We decided to tackle this once and for all, but there is a right way of going about making these changes to make sure you minimise any loss to rankings in the search engines. It was very laborious, but now the work is done, we’re glad we did it. These are the steps I took in case you decide to do a similar thing with your website. If you have a webmaster, it would be best to ask them to do this for you:

1. Copy and paste the urls (permalinks) of each of your blog posts onto a spreadsheet. We have over 300 posts so this took quite a bit of time.

2. Back up your WordPress database! This is important as you don’t want to lose any work in case things go wrong. We use the WP-DB Backup plugin.

3. Install 301 redirect and broken link plugins. We used the ‘Redirection‘ plugin and the ‘Broken Link Checker‘ plugin.

4. Disable any plugins which link to posts. I disabled a couple of plugins we use called LinkWithin which links to selected posts at the bottom of each blog post and Tweet Old Post, which automatically tweets out old blog posts.

5. Decide which format you would like your posts to take, we went from the format of year/month/post-title.html to category/post-title/. Make this change in the permalinks section under ‘Settings’, making sure you format the links correctly. The correct format of our new permalinks is:
/%category%/%postname%/

6. Record all the new permalinks of each blog post onto the spreadsheet you created earlier. It’s important to put the new urls in a second column against the old urls. This will take as long as it took in the first instance. I don’t know any shortcuts, but let me know if you do!

7. Using your new 301 redirect plugin, redirect each old url to the new url. This is very time consuming, but very important! It has to be done so that you don’t lose any rankings in the search engines and so that any links to posts in the old permalink format redirect to the new urls. Visitors clicking on a link in the old format will be automatically redirected to the blog post in its new format. Once done, do a few random checks to make sure the redirects are working.

8. Back up your site again.

9. Check the broken link checker for broken links and fix them (this doesn’t have to be done specifically for this exercise, but it’s good practice to check your site for broken links and fix them).

Now you can see why I put off doing this for a while! I would advise making any major changes to your site like this to a time when you’re a bit quieter with work. Don’t tackle it when you’re busy or during important trading times, e.g for retailers, during the run up to Christmas in case anything goes wrong and it affects rankings.

Although this is specifically for WordPress sites, you need to follow similar steps for any website if you plan to change the urls for any reason. The most important thing is to make sure the redirects are put into place properly. Your webmaster should be able to advise the best way of tackling it for your website.

Now you’re probably wondering where on earth are you going to find the time to start creating great, useful content amongst the zillions of other things you have to do, while still trying to have a life outside work!

A bit of rummaging around in files on your PC or in your desk drawers may reveal that you’ve already created quite a lot of content in the past that can be reused and repurposed. So here’s a few ideas showing how you could re-use old content giving it a very different look and format.

1. Articles
Most business owners have written articles on their specialist area and even if it was a few years ago, it doesn’t mean the article has go to waste. Often all they need are a bit of editing and updating so they can be re-used. Articles are perfect as blog posts as they can be broken down into shorter pieces and more often than not, you could get two or three posts out of them.

2. Blog Posts
I recently did some major updates to our Savvy Marketers site, which I’ll be writing about soon, and was surprised that in the three years we’ve been blogging, we now have over 300 posts between us. That’s an awful lot of information! Blog posts can be re-used in few ways: updated and re-posted to make them more current, put a few together as a longer article, or even turned into a guide or white paper if you have lots of posts around the same subject.

3. Videos
If you’ve written how-tos in the past, particularly with some screenshots or something like that, why not record it as a video how-to? Video sharing is huge and YouTube is one of the biggest social networks on the web, so don’t let your written word go to waste – change the format and get new use out of it!

4. Audio Interviews
Louise did a regular Blog Talk Radio show for a whole year back in 2009 (you can listen to archives here) and interviewed a different expert each week on a particular topic. Rather than let this great content go to waste, these expert interviews could be turned into articles, blog posts (with a link to the original interview), how to guides or white papers. It would take more time to do this than repurposing other content, but nevertheless, it would get more mileage out of the interviews as long as the content is still current. Another use of audio would be to take some previous blog posts or tips articles and make a series of short audios using a service such as Audioboo, or using your own digital recorder.

5. Webinars
Moving on from the monthly teleseminars that we’ve been doing, we’re now doing monthly webinars (and you can find out about our next one here), which means we’re producing information on slides in Powerpoint each month. Afterwards, we’re sharing the slides on Slideshare for those who couldn’t attend the live webinars, and along with our notes and the recorded audio from it, are able to produce how-to guides for our community.

This is just the start, there’s plenty more that you could do with existing content, whether it be written, audio, video or photo. Depending on what type of information your target market is looking for, and which format is appropriate for them, all you need is a bit of imagination to make your existing content go that much further.

What have you done to update or repurpose old content for your audience?

Image: Recycle Logo From Recycling Bin by chrissatchwell, on Flickr

Content Marketing is wonderful!

Our post explaining what content marketing is gives you some easy steps to get started with your own campaign. It’s so important that you do.

But we don’t want you to think this is a fast route to riches, or a shortcut to attracting more business. It’s actually quite hard work – just like all the other more traditional marketing you do.

However this can actually be an advantage

When people are searching for helpful information, they’re only really interested in the best, most up to date and accurate information to read, listen to or watch and learn from. Not so long ago they had to sift through a lot of poor content to find the occasional nuggets of good stuff (until Google’s famous panda update in March 2011). This update was bad news for for all the article spinners and ‘me-too’ scammers who were only interested in making a fast buck.

However, the update was great news for bloggers and creators of high quality original content – like you and me! Because the search results are now leading with better content, we have a better chance of being noticed for our areas of expertise and rewarded for our hard work with more leads. No longer are blatant promotions considered good content, whereas informative how-to articles and well-reasoned opinions are.

Good quality content brings other rewards worth having too

When you publish good quality content, the people who read/listen to/watch it will want to share it with their social networking contacts. They will also be more likely to write a comment (on your blog or Facebook page) so you’ll know who is interested in what you do. And of course, the more different platforms you publish on, the wider your reach will be, and the greater number of people will be likely to find out about you and share with their social networking contacts …..

Content marketing is definitely a marathon and not a sprint, so settle in for the long haul. You can watch the wimps and the fly by nights fall by the wayside!

If you found this post helpful, we’d appreciate if you would share it with the network of your choice by clicking one of the buttons below!

One of the challenges when you blog about anything to do with the internet is that changes take place so quickly and frequently

So it’s important for us to regularly revisit as many posts as possible to check the information in them is still valid.

When I was doing this here on Savvy Marketers the other day, I came across a post about basic email newsletter mistakes which I wrote 2 years ago. As I read through it, two things occurred to me.

First, all the mistakes highlighted in the post are just as valid today as they were then. Second, I’m seeing these very same mistakes almost every day in email marketing (link to product) messages that arrive in my inbox. How depressing

It seems a little reminder is called for…

Let’s return to those Email Marketing basics

1. Don’t send out your email newsletter or announcement as an attachment. Opening files that arrive in your inbox, even from people you know, is how most computers become infected by viruses.
2. Don’t send out your email newsletter or main announcement as an embedded image. Not only may some people not be able to see anything, none of your links will be click-able.
3. Don’t send people irrelevant mailings. If they subscribed to your list for business tips, don’t send them the new pasta recipe you just discovered. Stay on topic.
4. Don’t automatically add people to your mailing list without asking their permission first. Just because you met them once doesn’t mean they want to receive emails from you every week.
5. Don’t send only emails that promote your business, if you want a) people to stay on your list and b) people to actually open and read your messages.
6. Do use a trusted Email Service Provider (ESP) and not Outlook or other computer based program. We use MailChimp, and recommend it. Other good providers include AWeber, Vertical Response, Constant Contact.
7. Do provide a ‘one-click’ unsubscribe for people to easily remove themselves from your mailing list. If you make them have to do much more than click once, you’ll increase the chances of being reported as a spammer.
8. Do make it clear what you want people to do, eg. ‘click here’, ‘read more’, ‘get more details’. If you’re going to do an email campaign, do it with a purpose!
9. Do provide useful and interesting information, tips, how-to articles. Be generous and show your readers that you know your stuff.
10. Do check your mailings before sending them to everyone. Typos, spelling, grammar, formatting, links go to the right places. Check everything. More than once.

For more posts on this topic, simply type Email Marketing into the ‘Search’ box on the right, or click on the ‘Email Marketing’ Category at the bottom of this page.  You might also want to take a look at our ‘Email Marketing Guide’ for more comprehensive information.

What would you add to this list?

There are 5 mainstream blogging platforms, which include:

WordPress (there are 2 versions, a self-hosted and a free, hosted)

Typepad (also has 2 versions, a small business and enterprise version)
Blogger
Tumblr
Posterous

I’ve used all of these blogging platforms, except for the enterprise version of Typepad, called Moveable Type. Which blogging platform you choose to use depends largely on what you want to use it for; whether you’re just starting out blogging, if it’s going to be a website in itself or an add on to an existing site, or a personal/hobby blog – so there’s no simple answer to the best one you should be using.

WordPress is probably the most popular blogging platform, with a free, hosted version and a self-hosted version (I’ve previously written about the difference between the two: WordPress.com vs WordPress.org). I’ve clients who use the hosted version, some who use the self-hosted version, and of course, Savvy Marketers is built on the self-hosted version of WordPress. It made sense to choose this option as we want to build a community around our site and share our knowledge, therefore building a site on a blogging platform was the best way forward.

Clients of mine who use the free, hosted version of WordPress already have their own site but wanted a blogging facility attached to it. It was easy to set up and they could change the blog url to a subdomain of their site, so for example, rather than use mysite.wordpress.com, they could use blog.mysite.com/.co.uk

Typepad is similar to WordPress in that it also has two versions. The hosted version for small businesses is paid, although it doesn’t cost much to use (from $9 per month). The enterprise version is called ‘Moveable Type’ and can be hosted on a company’s network, similar to the self-hosted version of WordPress. It works well for businesses wanting multiple blogs. Typepad hasn’t been as popular as WordPress, despite being easy to use (Savvy Marketers was originally started on Typepad), but less flexible than WordPress, which is why we changed about 6 months after setting up our site. (I had previously set up another blog on WordPress, so didn’t mind the move!)

Blogger has been around for quite a long time and acquired by Google in 2003. Funnily enough it was started by Evan Williams of Twitter (well before his Twitter days!). Blogger doesn’t have as many features or flexibility as WordPress or Typepad, but is a good place to start if you’ve never blogged before. In fact, both Louise and I started our first blogs on Blogger where we got to grips with blogging before setting up blogs elsewhere. Quite a lot of blogs on Blogger are personal or hobby blogs rather than business blogs, probably because those types of bloggers don’t need such advanced features, but tend to place ads on the blog, which is easy to do with Blogger, as it provides good Google Adsense integration.

Tumblr is currently going from strength to strength for people who want to set up more of a personal blog. It’s incredibly easy to use and you can choose which format your post will take, e.g text, a photo, video, audio, link, quote etc, so it takes minutes to put something up. I’ve noticed that many Tumblr blogs make good use of photography, you can post an image on it’s own with no text if you so wish and easily publish from an iPhone.

Posterous is another easy to use, fairly basic blogging platform, which I like for its simplicity. We have another Savvy Marketers blog on Posterous, with only a couple of posts on it at the moment, but intend to add more to it. You can post to your blog by email and also with an iPhone app. Again, great for people who want a simple or personal blog.

What’s great about all of these blogging platforms is that if you start a blog on one of them and decide to move on, you can generally import your posts to another blogging platform quite easily. I’ve moved a Blogger blog to WordPress and a Typepad blog to WordPress, both without problem!

So before you set up your blog, ask yourself these questions:

1. Why am I blogging, i.e is it for business, professional blogging or a personal/hobby blog?

2. Will it be a site in itself or an add-on to an existing site?

3. What do I want to get out of it, e.g new business, revenue from advertising, or just a bit of fun?

4. How much time do I have to maintain my blog?

5. Do I want to get involved in anything too technical?

Hopefully this will point you in the right direction to choosing the right blogging platform!

Which blogging platform do you use and why did you choose it? Please share your blogging experiences here!

Image: I’m blogging this. by Foxtongue, on Flickr

We’ve both learnt over the years how to respond to those who take the time to comment on our posts, and also how to deal with the ‘keyboard warriors’ who may respond less than nicely!

Blogging etiquette isn’t just about looking after the people who visit and comment on your blog, but also within the social networks themselves.

Here are a few tips to make sure you look after the community on your blog and of course, your wider reputation:

1. Always make sure comments on your posts are moderated quickly. Don’t let people wait days before you get around to approving the comments, as people want to see their responses published as soon as possible.

2. Respond to comments. Louise and I always take the time to respond to people, as they’ve taken the time to respond to us. It’s good manners and will encourage people to come back to your blog. If you’re in the fortunate position of getting a lot of comments, then try to respond to as many as you can, even if you answer a few people at once in your response.

3. Once people get used to you publishing on a certain day of the week, try to stick to it, as people will be expecting to read your posts each week. Don’t neglect to publish – treat your blog like a professional publication to keep your community happy and coming back.

4. If people share your posts on the social networks, thank them there too, it’s more likely they’ll share your posts again if you show appreciation.

5. If you receive criticism or derogatory comments on your posts, don’t be tempted to argue – it looks unprofessional. It’s best to accept the criticism politely but respond without making matters worse. If the comments are abusive, you can delete them and of course close comments! Whatever you do, don’t get sucked into an argument like this author recently did on a book review blog, which you can read here:

The Greek Seaman / Jacqueline Howett on BigAl’s Books & Pals

Unfortunately, her taking the criticism badly didn’t do much for her reputation! You can read more about the incident here along with other online blunders made by authors after receiving criticism:

What happened when author Jacqueline Howettan fired back at the critics – The National

As Louise often says in workshops and talks, ‘never tweet or post anything in anger or under the influence!‘ That also means commenting on or writing blog posts!

Etiquette isn’t just about looking after the community on your blog and social networks, but looking after your own reputation.

What can you add to this list? How do you look after your community within your blog and on the social networks?

Image: Etiquette by Daquella manera, on Flickr