Business Blogging Excellence

Squidoo About You

There is a great site out there called Squidoo that you should know about. Why, you ask? For starters, this site is completely free, and it lets you create your own webspace with ease. Nothing beats free buzz! From here you can create links to your own products or webpage, write a small bio, and more. It’s a good, simple tool for spreading the word of your business on the web.

You can even create multiple squidoo lenses to get the message out even further. Check it out.

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Are You Socially Adept?

All too often we face people and don’t even realize what we are doing when we talk to others. Many people believe they are good speakers, but are you really? Below are 7 simple good tips for conversation that everyone should know, but don’t always practice. Take a look at them for yourself and see where you stand.

1. Listen! This is the first point for a reason. You may be really excited to tell someone about yourself or your business but give some room for the other person to talk first. Remember, people like to hear themselves. Also, this shows the person that you care, and the person will be more willing to hear your side. Don’t worry, you’ll have your chance to talk when they are through speaking. Just listen first, and who knows…you may learn something!
2. Make Eye Contact, but don’t stare. While it is true that you do not want your eyes to constantly wander around when speaking, something is to be said of the one who pierces their gaze straight through someone in either a creepy or threatening way.
3. Handshaking. A good firm handshake says a lot about your character. Find that nice balance between being too soft (giving the receiver that unsettling, snake like handshake) and too hard (it’s not good to cripple the hand of the person you are meeting!). This may sound like something you already know, but when you become aware of it you will see how many people don’t follow this.
4. If there are multiple people involved in speaking, make an effort to get everyone involved in the conversation. How often have you been in a situation where two people are talking and one is the odd man out? Try to keep everyone drawn in to keep things dynamic.
5. Remember the person’s name. With so many people you may meet, you may find it hard to keep track of who’s who. An easy way to remember the person’s name is to incorporate their name when speaking to them. This will constantly remind you who you are talking to. “Tell me John, what does your company do?” or “John, how long have you been practicing eastern medicine?” are a few examples.
6. Body language. The other form of communication. Avoid crossing arms. This is a defense mechanism that shows you are uncomfortable, feeling insecure, and setting up barriers. Leave your hands at your sides, or even behind your back is more inviting. Also be aware of your posture, it speaks volumes about your confidence.
7. Be aware of yourself. It is too easy to lose focus when you are deep in an exciting conversation, but you must maintain focus and be aware of your etiquette and behavior in a social situation.

These may all sound like things you’ve heard before, but so few actually follow these cues. Let this Blog be a reminder of what dos and don’ts are out there in social situations. It may sound simple, but to some this is amazingly difficult to do. Keep these things in mind next time you engage in conversation and you’ll be amazed at what you see.

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Are You Saying Too Much?

Giving out too much information is a buzz killer. I do not mean in the Blogging sense, where I do not mind giving away my ideas. I mean in the personal, face to face sense where 80% of word of mouth happens.

All too often we continue to talk until we take the interest a person had and suck that out of them with more information than they ever wanted to know.

Here are some suggestions for cutting back on this dangerous buzz killer.

• Listen More, Talk Less
• Do not give out too much detail. Leave something for the imagination if it is not essential to know.
• Ask more questions.
• Tell stories that illustrate the value of your product or service in real life.
• Tell people about when you saved the day.
• Take out the meaningless, cliché words - This is an innovative, cutting edge, revolutionary Blog post. BS BS BS
• Pace yourself and do not walk all over a question someone asks.
• Make it clear, simple and interesting so they can tell thier friends.

And breath. Breathing is good.

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Blog Comments - Are you participating?

Don’t be Shy.

Bloggers tend to like comments on their Blog as long as they are not obviously spam. Yet, most bloggers get 100’s of visits and few posts. [Except for those highly controversial ones]

If you want to create some buzz, [this might be more of a low key hum] leave posts every time you visit a blog. If you take the time to read a post, leave a comment that is meaningful or at least a “Right on” sort of thing. Also visit a variety of blogs.

If nothing else, the blog owner will visit your site if you comment.

If you have read this far, I want you to post a comment on this post. Even if it is just introducing yourself. It only takes a minute and if you are here because you are interested in buzz, but you cannot step up to a simple buzz challenge like this, we have a problem.

Let me let you in on a secret:

Most bloggers are human. Some may be CEO’s, professors or McDonald’s cashiers, but in most cases they have 10 fingers and 10 toes, just like you most likely do. Don’t think that your comment is not worthy of the blog.

Blog Comment Etiquette

Proper etiquette for blog posts should take into account the simple fact that both parties should benefit.

A) The Blogger benefits because any conversation on the blog gives it more validity and builds better relationships with readers. It also tells a blogger a little more about the type of people that are visiting and reading.

B) The Commenteer gets to express their view on a subject, gets a link back to their website or blog, and piggybacks on the popularity of the blog they are reading for a little buzz.

When leaving a comment,

1. Say something relevant to the post.
2. Do not blatantly promote yourself. Interesting comment will make people investigate you, and that is better than any commercial you could write.
3. Only put links in the comment if they are highly relevant. Bloggers do not like visitors to see too many exit signs.
4. Try to write in a voice and manner that matches the blog. If it is a political blog bashing someone, it is fine to leave similar comments if that is what you want to say. In this blog I would be a bit puzzled if you said “Blogging Sucks!”

There are more things I could say on this topic, but there are exceptions to rules based on the blog. Keep in mind that when you are posting on a blog you are a guest in the blogger’s house, but the blogger probably likes a lively debate.

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Creating Employee Advocates

An advocate is someone that tells others about the benefits of using something and encourages others to use the product or service.

Wouldn’t it be great if you had 10 people out their strongly advocating you?

If you are looking for advocates among people you do not know well, then you have a lot of hard work in front of you. However, there is another group that many small and mid-sized businesses overlook: Employees.

If your current work culture says employees work a set time limit on a set of tasks, and does not take into consideration the extended network of people each employee knows, you are missing out on a huge opportunity.

Employees in the right environment and with the right encouragement will create buzz and word of mouth for their organization. They need to understand that buzz is everyone’s responsibility and they have to have success stories and good information that will help them create buzz more easily. This phenomenon is called Employee Evangelism.

Some key strategies that can help you begin an employee evangelism movement in your organization are:

• Let people know how and why you want to do it, and how it will benefit them.
• Create a Buzz Guide that spells out the do’s and don’ts of creating buzz.
• Publish and distribute success stories, company information and interesting trivia to employees and customers. Encourage them to share it.
• Publicly recognize employees that create buzz.
• Encourage reporting of buzz efforts.
• Set a goal of a minimum number of buzz attempts each week.
• Encourage employees to become experts in a given field.

If you do those things, and also give your advocates clear examples and instructions on buzz tools, you will find your business growing quickly. Some examples of buzz tools are:

• Blogging
• Podcasts
• News sites where you can post news, such as www.digg.com
• email follow-ups with stale connections
• Build a Squidoo lens
• Bookmark company pages with social bookmark tools like del.icio.us
• Hand out coupons to people they know

There are 100’s of variations of this kind of buzz creating opportunity. The most important thing to remember is that one or two of these things occasionally is not going to do much. If you successfully build a culture of buzz and a culture where every employee feels like they are responsible for the success of the organization, then you will be able to sustain the buzz effort and eventually hit a crucial mass where you have customers lining up for what you have to offer.

The best part of this whole thing is that this technique costs less than traditional marketing and advertising and word of mouth is shown to be one of the most effective and influential mediums to get your message out to potential customers. It is well worth the extra effort, and in a relatively short period of time it will be paying off.

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Why do Influential People Blog?

Influential people Blog because it allows them to broadcast their message and extend their influence. It is a way to build a loyal following and in a few minutes, effect what many people think and do.

Even if I am a huge fan of a particular influential person, television and print is not a good medium for me to follow them effectively because I cannot just turn on the TV or leaf though all the print magazines on my own time each day and find out what my favorite influencer is thinking or saying.

In the past, many influential people have been part of organizations that have had websites, but because of the professional polished nature of the website, they could not easily state their opinions openly and regularly.

Now that corporate Blogging has hit the mainstream, many more influential people are blogging and creating a following outside of the corporate website. Any author publishing non-fiction better have a blog or they are going to disappoint their readers. Innovators have blogs to talk about their passion for their innovations. VC’s now seem to all have blogs.

Blogging is easy and it is perfectly acceptable to write quick comments that do seem like a great deal of work.

One question you may ask yourself is this. Which came first, the chicken (influential person) or the egg (the blog)?

If someone is even moderately influential and they begin blogging on a regular basis in a focused way on a topic that people care about, they will find that their level of influence goes up each month. Eventually, their blog may eclipse the other things that first gave them influence, because the blog can be accessed daily at a reader’s leisure.

Whether you are an influential person today or want to be an influential person tomorrow, blogs are a great way to capture a larger audience with a minimal effort towards crafting your message and making you accessible.

To purchase a blog and get started visit Outstanda.

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Blogging Helps

Last night I went to a Jump Start Event locally and ran into the CMO of Jump Start, Thom Ruhe.  When he found out who I was, he said he reads my Buzzoodle Blog all the time. It is wonderful to meet people who read your blog before they ever meet you in person, and this happens all the time to me.

I suppose it happens to book authors every day.  But how often does it happen to business owners?  Frequently if you blog and do a good job.

When you are writing a blog post, you frequently do it out of habit, and you do not think about the readers.  You should, because they are reading what you write and deciding on the level of relationship they will have with you.

What are your readers options?

• Read one article and leave
• Read and explore the blog for useful stuff that appeals to them
• Subcribe to your RSS feed
• Subscribe to an email newsletter or updates
• Link to you for their website or blog
• Contact you
• Bookmark you - (see bar at end of post)
• Refer to your work in an article, publication, etc.
• Comment or trackback to your post

The more you blog and the higher the quality of your posts, the more this will happen.  It is also important for generating more traffic, which is more people to make these kinds of decisions.

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Rule #1 to Increase Website and Blog Traffic

There is a rule for getting great website traffic. This king of website traffic rule does not mean that pages cannot be targeted to specific keywords, and it does not mean that meta tags are not important. It does trump all other website traffic rules for importance. 

How do you increase website traffic for free?

Let me use an example before I reveal the free website traffic secret rule.

We have worked for years with a university that has published an eNewsletter for faculty and staff. While it is on a public website and it does get website traffic drawn in by the eNewsletter email push, it also has some disadvantages. The administrators do not care about it getting seen by anyone outside of the university.

Because it is on an older content management system and there is no need to add the SEO elements to the eNewsletter, it has been left alone. No title tags, keywords or descriptions.

The website does not have friendly url and links, alt tags or any thought to targeting search engine results.

Yet this website suffers from great website traffic. It suffers from lots of Google, Yahoo and MSN hits. It suffers from having better website traffic than the main campus website, at certain times of the year.

So what is the number one, big time secret website traffic rule they know? Content.

Their website traffic, even poorly optimized, is high for sheer brute force. The quality and quantity of their articles and posts (about 15 articles a week for 4 years) has created an ePublishing paradise, a search engine gold mine, and a public information resource that sheds light on the operation of a university and the lives of faculty and staff.

Lots of specific, high quality content updated regularly on your website will pay dividends in website traffic eventually. If you can optimize some of these web pages, all the better. But even if you do not, eventually lots of good content will find its way into people search results and generate higher website traffic.

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The Multimedia Generation

A teenager listens to his iPod Nano in a subway station. A man next to him is listening to a podcast on his iPod. Across from them is someone else downloading songs to his mobile phone. It’s official, multimedia is an active part of our lives.

Tech companies are jumping on the multimedia band wagon in droves. The evidence is clear: Mobile phones can browse the web, play mp3s, videos, and take photos. iPods have extended themselves to include Podcasting, a brilliant tool that has increased marketing for the product rapidly. Televisions now have SD card slots for slideshows of pictures from digital cameras.

Gaming has been seeing a rapid transformation into the multimedia era as well. Both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 are (or in PS3’s case, will be) online, and boast a slew of multimedia features. Now gamers can connect to devices via USB port on their consoles. This opens the door to many possibilities such as photo sharing, downloading mp3s, and more. The online component of the systems give gamers the ability to download movie trailers, game demos, desktop themes, and more.

What does this all mean? It means that to be competitive and successful in the electronics industry, you will need more than just power as your selling point. Devices now have more features than you can shake a stick at. They have become the new swiss army knives. When marketing a device, ask yourself this: Does our device support any kind of connectivity? Having PC connectivity is one thing, but can it connect to other devices, such as an iPod or PSP, as well? People like it when their devices talk to each other. It opens the door to more possibilities and gives them a sense of freedom. Online connectivity has been more prevalent in devices and paves the path to more marketing opportunities as well.

The bar for the tech industry has been raised, and it will take a lot more than just processing power, mega pixels, and storage capacity to win people over. People expect more from their tech toys now. Can your product deliver?

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