If you’ve used plugins, please share which ones you like below – it’s always useful to know the good ones out there!

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.

Have you noticed how social media sites are giving slide presentations a new lease of life?

Not so long ago PowerPoint (and its Mac equivalent Keynote) had a bad reputation with many presentations rightfully earning the label: “Death by PowerPoint”. Slides were often too busy, too wordy to read, or just too complex to understand. Even worse were those presenters who used them as auto cues, reading word for word and boring their audience to sleep.

But now it seems that a whole new generation of talented presenters are breathing new life into PowerPoint slideshows. The best ones are creating visually pleasing and attention-grabbing images, making text short & snappy and, most importantly, keeping us interested. No mean feat in this much reduced attention span age!

So in addition to using slide presentations at traditional offline events, such as when giving talks or running training workshops, there are now online opportunities for this frequently overlooked medium.

1. Presentations uploaded to Slideshare.net quickly show up in the search engines so it’s worth taking the time to categorise and tag them properly. A basic account is free to set up and very easy to use. Here are the Savvy Marketers presentations we’ve uploaded.
2. YouTube is already known as the second largest search engine and millions of videos are watched every day around the world. Recording your slide presentation, accompanied by audio, and uploading the result to YouTube means you can then embed the video in your website or blog, and share it with your Facebook fans & friends too. Other free video sharing options worth considering include Vimeo and Viddler.
3. Another good place to share your PowerPoint presentation is on your LinkedIn profile or LinkedIn Company page. You can either add the Slideshare application or embed the video into a Google Docs presentation.
4. Webinars are becoming an increasingly popular way of sharing information online. Depending on the service used, screen-sharing means including a slide presentation is straightforward and adds that important visual element to help get your message across and keep your audience’s attention.

Creating slide presentations is yet another great way to share that all-important content, and one that doesn’t require too much writing.

What new or different ways have you seen PowerPoint used recently? Please share in the comments below.

We’re definitely in favour of making life easier by using some of the great automation tools available online

Twitterfeed is great for automatically tweeting the RSS feeds of your and other peoples’ blogs and articles and it isn’t hard to do. Once you’ve set up your account you type in the blog feed URL including the http://www.blogname.com/feed (you can find the feed URL by hovering over the orange RSS button on the site). Each time a new post is published by that blogger, Twitterfeed sends out a tweet from your Twitter account. You can personalise tweets by prefacing with, for example: ‘Latest post: …’.

Social Oomph (formerly Tweet Later) has many useful features. We use it to ‘vet’ or check out latest followers on Twitter, decide if we want to follow them back (or sometimes block any undesirables!), and then assign them to a list. Another great use for this tool is to write & store draft tweets and preschedule them to go out at specified times and dates in the future.

Unlike many people we think an automated welcome message to new followers can be OK, provided it is just a welcome – and doesn’t include a pitch, or even a link to a free report (that’s just tacky!).

Twitter clients TweetDeck and Hootsuite both allow you to manage your twitter accounts, lists and followers as well as to connect with other social networks. This means you can update your Facebook and LinkedIn status with just a single tweet. One of the main differences between the two clients is that TweetDeck requires you to download software onto your computer (this can slow things down a bit for older PCs), whereas Hootsuite has a web-based option so just needs an internet connection to run.

Setting up and personalising an iGoogle page with some of the many available ‘gadgets’ lets you each of your social media networks, preview your Google Mail, Google Calendar and Google Docs – all on the same page . This makes it easy to quickly glance and catch up with what’s going on in your online world whenever you have a few moments, without the need to log into each individual account.

It’s tempting to get carried away with all this available automation, but if you set up every tweet to also automatically update your status on LinkedIn and Facebook, it will get very irritating for your connections on those sites. Do you really want everyone to see every tweet you send? Twitter is the best place to contain the chatter, so we recommend you use the appropriate tools and be selective.

As a final thought for today, while these automated tools are great at saving time it’s a good idea to occasionally check they’re still doing what you intended when you set them up. If you plan to use social media marketing regularly to help promote your business, it’s well worth automating some broadcasts to save time and effort. But people will notice if you try to automate too much, so make sure you stop and ‘chat’ with your connections, even if only for a few minutes a day – and be ‘sociable’!

What’s your favourite social media marketing automation tool? We’d love you to share it here!

We hear a lot of people say

This question assumes that social media is something you can do once and not have to return to. Sorry to disappoint but Social Media marketing is a bit like a huge jigsaw puzzle and, because social media keeps on changing and growing, the jigsaw is never completely finished.

As an eternal ‘tweaker’ I can honestly say that there are so many little pieces, it takes forever to put them all in the right place on the picture that is social media.

What we find is that it’s often the little pieces of the puzzle that can make the biggest difference and have the most impact on business.

Here are just 15 little pieces that you may want to use for your own social media marketing puzzle:

Twitter

• Check that you have included a up to date live link back to your website in your bio.
• If you’re using automation tools, make sure the scheduled tweets are still relevant.
• Have you cleared out inactive or spammy followers lately?

Facebook

• On your Personal Profile, check you have included links to your Facebook Business Page, Twitter account and website(s) in the Contact Information section of the Info tab.
• Engage with friends and family on your Personal profile, but gradually move business acquaintances over to the Business Page.
• On your Facebook Business Page, set up a routine to add interesting content every day (auto-linking Twitter doesn’t count ).

LinkedIn

• Check that your profile is up to date – current employer & summary
• Have you selected your specialist areas yet?
• Create a Company page for your business and start promoting your products & services.

Blog

• Is your Sign-up box to collect visitor details and build your list prominently displayed?
• Check that the RSS feed link works (clicking on it should open a selection of readers, not a page of code)
• Give readers plenty of opportunities to share your articles around the internet.

Google+

• Create and complete your profile (with photograph) and include relevant links to your other online homes
• Create a Google+ Business Page and add your information to the About Page.
• Add a Google+ Profile Badge to your website and blog. (If you’re on WordPress here’s a plugin: http://plusdevs.com/google-wordpress-plugin/)

As with all marketing activities you will need to try, test and monitor to find out which social media pieces work best for your business.

Over to you – what jigsaw pieces would you include?

I was chatting with a fellow business owner over coffee the other day

We went through the need and purpose of having a blog and setting up accounts with the various social networks where his target market were most likely to be, and then I asked him: ‘How big is your list?’

His answer was pretty much what I’d expected: that he had a lot of contacts but they weren’t organized in any way or stored in a central place, for example on an Excel spreadsheet.

The traditional way of collecting business cards at networking events and trade shows often results in a drawer full of cards and very little else. Even if these cards are put into a display folder of some kind, they still won’t be of any use for email marketing until they at least find their way onto a computer.

As I explained to my downcast colleague, in order to make the best use of email marketing, he really needed to have enough people to send his emails to!

We agreed that his best starting point was to create an Excel spreadsheet and manually enter the contact details. From there it will be easy for him to upload the data to an email service provider (such as MailChimp, AWeber or Constant Contact – and there are many others). When it comes to those drawers full of business cards, his options include various scanning machines & software packages, and he would do well to consider the newer technology Apps for smartphones, such as ScanBizCards.

A common list building mistake 

One of the problems I’ve seen recently with enthusiastic social networking business owners is that they’re so focused on building a following on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and so on, that they seem to have lost sight of the importance of building an email marketing list.

Just think about how quickly those online newstreams, updates and Twitter feeds move down the screen. You have no guarantee that your followers are actually going to see your message, amongst all the other messages vying for their attention, let alone click on a link.

On the other hand, an email is a targeted marketing message arriving in each individual’s inbox. They will have given permission for you to send them such emails and, providing proper opt-in procedures are followed, the recipient has to consciously decide what to do with each message they get from you. While some people may choose to delete without reading, if the campaign has been well put together, your email stands a much better chance of being opened.

By the time we’d finished our coffees, my fellow business owner had written down clear steps to get his email marketing list off the ground and had an understanding why it was urgent and important to keep taking action and build on it.

What would you have recommended he do to build his email marketing list? Please leave your suggestion in the comments below.

There’s no simple answer to this question

In fact, one lady we spoke to recently, who has never blogged before, was told she should blog every day! Now that’s a very good way of putting people off from starting a blog, or adding stress to their already busy day. Many small business owners do not need to blog every day, and it doesn’t mean they’re going to miss out on valuable enquiries because of it. For many business owners, this is simply not possible.

However, we believe that small businesses do need to take on a blog seriously, and commit to keeping it up to date. Blogs are such an excellent way of showing off your expertise, giving personality to your business and highlighting your opinions. And it’s a great shame not to make the most of this mostly free technology.

So how often should you blog?

There is no set amount of times you should blog each week or month, but as previously mentioned, once you’ve set one up on your site, you have to commit to it (and if you can’t, then think twice about setting one up in the first place).

If you’re new to blogging, I would try and keep it updated every week or so. That should give you enough time to think about what information you can add and hopefully you should have something to say about your business or industry in this timescale. When you’re new to blogging it can be more difficult to write as well, so take that into account, but the more you add content or write posts, the more confident you’ll become. Don’t be a slave to written posts solely either, you can also post photos and videos, and if they’re more appropriate to your audience, then include those regularly.

Once you start to blog on a regular basis, your readers will start to expect to hear from you, so once you start attracting readers, this is the time to make sure you keep up your blog! Treat it as an editorial whereby you have to publish at certain times, you certainly don’t want to let down your community or undo any hard work you’ve done in attracting visitors to your blog in the first place. Since Louise and I set up Savvy Marketers in 2008, we have blogged twice a week since without fail (1 post per week each), and are now introducing additional guest posts for added perspective and interest for our readers. Not only has this helped us to build a community around the blog, but gives us more opportunity to spread our message in the social networks and get found in a search.

We’ve written many posts on blogging, and here are a few for further reading:

5 Reasons Why You Need a Blogging Calendar

How to Get More People to Read Your Blog

Savvy Blog Resources

For more guidance on blogging, check out our guide, ‘Get Started with Blogging’.

How often do you blog? Has blogging regularly helped you to build a community and generate more leads for your business?

I tend to comment on blogs rather erratically, but if a post really resonates with me at that particular time, then I’m probably more likely to comment. I expect it could be the same for you too. The post may resonate with me because it’s something I’m currently doing or researching, perhaps how I’m feeling, or something I’m struggling with. As if the post has arrived at just the right moment!

As for when I’m just scrolling through my blog subscriptions, even when I think a post is really good, I may not comment for a few reasons:

• I haven’t got the time
• The post doesn’t encourage me or motivate me to comment
• There are already lots of other comments (especially when it comes to high traffic/popular blogs)
• I don’t feel I can contribute anything meaningful, particularly if there are lots of intelligent answers!

Guest post from Robin Houghton of Eggbox Marketing

I just wanted to mention a couple of things about commenting, because commenting has come up a few times lately in different contexts. If you blog, and are trying to attract more readers and commenters on your own blog, one thing you need to be doing is commenting on other blogs. We all sort of know that, but let’s remind ourselves about why and how.

Commenting on other blogs means you are reading other blogs. This is important if you want to stay in touch with what’s happening in the world of your readers/customers – see next bullet.

If you are blogging on behalf of a business, read the blogs that your customers/prospects are following. You’ll learn more about what interests them, which means you can blog about things that interest them. For example, if you are an accountancy firm looking to attract retail customers, read and comment on blogs to do with sales promotions, merchandising techniques, supermarket vs high street debates, local trade or tourism issues and so forth.

Always sign in to leave a comment and use a consistent identity – your Twitter, Facebook or OpenID profile for example. Even if they don’t always follow the link to your profile readers will start to recognise your name (and face, if you are showing it).

Remember you’re not a spammer, so don’t leave irrelevant or one-sentence comments in the hope you’ll earn some link juice. Links within comments are generally ignored by search engines, it’s humans you’re trying to attract.

Set yourself a commenting schedule. Check out the blogs you’re following by using a tool like Feedly, and aim to read and comment on a set number of blog posts per week. Create the time needed for this. Comments don’t have to be long essays but they should add value in some way to the original post.

The last point is one I have yet to implement – I tend to write comments that are either too short or two long, mainly because I haven’t scheduled any time and so feel I’m digressing from my real work. Wrong!

If you haven’t already seen it, here’s a great video from Darren Rowse of Problogger on the power of comments, definitely worth a watch.

And of course, feel free to leave a comment!

Robin Houghton has been blogging and guest blogging for many years on topics ranging from poetry to Regency costume. Her business blog is where she muses about marketing, communications and business trends. After a decade in corporate marketing, Robin has worked in online since 2000, the last nine years running her own business helping SMEs get to grips with the internet. She has an MA (Distinction) in Digital Media from the University of Sussex. Her first book ‘Blogging for Creatives’ is due to be published jointly by Ilex and F & W Media in early 2012.

Most plugins are free to use on your site, developed by enthusiasts of WordPress, but be cautious where you download them from. I recommend only downloading free plugins from the WordPress.org site as they’ve been vetted and should be secure.

1. Anti Spam Plugins
Akismet is one of the most popular anti spam plugins. This does a great job of ensuring spam goes into the spam filter and rarely does a spam comment end up in the comment moderation queue. It’s worth checking through the comment spam from time to time before you empty it to make sure no genuine comments are in there, but you’ll be amazed at how much comment spam you’ll get! There is now a subscription charge to Akismet, from free for non-commercial blogs or starting at $5 for small business blogs. We’ve also recently started using another neat plugin called ‘Growmap Anti Spambot’ which asks genuine commenters to click a box when they leave a comment. It’s reduced spam down to just a few per week now.

2. Sharing Plugins
There are plenty of sharing button plugins for WordPress blogs and it’s important you use them! Making your content easy to share helps to grow your social networking connections and spread the word about your business. If people like your posts, they’re likely to share them so this process has to be as simple as possible! These are the ones we currently use:

Tweetmeme – a Twitter re-tweet button which shows how many times your post has been re-tweeted.

SexyBookmarks – a plugin which goes at the bottom of each post giving different sharing options, e.g sharing to Facebook, LinkedIn, by email, as well as to social bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon & Delicious.

Facebook Like button – for people to share your content on Facebook

Google +1 button – for people to ‘+1’ your content on Google

3. Techie Plugins
I’m calling these plugins more ‘techie’ as they help with security and operational efficiency.

WP Security Scan – let’s you know of any security issues with your site

WP DB Backup – a plugin which you can use to back up your site’s data (blog posts and page content). This is essential if you host your own WordPress site – make sure you or your webmaster backs up your data regularly.

Redirection – I recently used this plugin when we changed the permalinks of our blog posts so we don’t lost traffic or rankings (you can read more about how I used it here: The Right Way to Change Your Blog’s Permalinks

I hope you find some of these plugins useful for your own WordPress site.

If you use plugins which you’ve found to be useful, please don’t keep them a secret – share them here!

Image: A green plug socket on the wall – Ganton Street, London by ell brown, on Flickr