Blog Professional

Brian over at Copyblogger has another great post on grammar errors to avoid:

It?s time once again to review those nasty errors that damage our credibility when we write. Not normally a fun task, but absolutely necessary. I promise to keep you amused to diminish the pain (or at least I?ll give it a shot).

As with the last time we explored grammatical errors, I feel compelled to mention that copywriting and blogging should be conversational and engaging, and breaking formal grammatical and spelling conventions can often be a good thing. Every time I see a comment complaining about something like, oh, I don?t know? the improper use of an ellipsis or one-sentence paragraphs, I shake my head with sadness. Source: Do You Make These Mistakes When You Write? | Copyblogger

Sure, blogging is supposed to be less formal than other forms of communication, and Lord knows Jim and I make enough mistakes ourselves, but when you’re blogging for your business you do need to take some extra care and proofread your posts–spell check too!–before hitting that magic “Publish” button.

Oh and if you do find and error later, just go back and edit the post.  I’m sure no one noticed.

Suzanne Falter-Barns of GetKnownNow.com published to her blog, sensing 'blog fatigue' amongst people's lives. I quote from her post, "So is it just me or do blogs seem like they might be diminishing in MUST DO importance in people's lives? I'm not saying that's an accurate view … but just something in the air I kind of sense."

What do you think?

Here's my response to her post…

"Suzanne, I appreciate your keen intuition in this matter. As a blogging coach to thousands of business owners through WordpressTutorials.com and speaking to the same audience in conferences, this is my take on this.

There is a camp that have heard of blogging and its importance and benefits, and are just starting out. Good for you folks Keep going…

Then there's the camp who are blogging, and enjoying the many benefits from this publishing platform.

The latter are emailing me or pulling me aside at conferences, revealing that its quite painstaking, or laborious to keep a consistent publishing schedule.

What to do?

Well, this is a situation of 'do what I say, don't do what I do'

This is a strategy I've coined "B52". I recommend you spend a weekend or two, and craft out 52 blog posts/tips/how-to's etc and pre-schedule/post-date your blog posts - one post per week. Hence, 52 tips will publish automatically to your blog, in its respective categories.

As a result, you're blessed with a consistent blog publishing schedule that speaks volumes to your audience (credibility, SME, conversions etc) and the search engines (consistent indexing, increased rankings, increased traffic etc).

For those who ask 'I don't have time to write a few blog posts, let alone 52' - this is my response…

"Think outside of the box!"

Outsource the writing to your personal assistant, VA, team member, staff etc. As long as your content is evergreen, it'll fly. And keep your 'voice', your 'vibe' - you know what I mean?

Then when the motivation or inspiration kicks in, feel free to craft additional post/s to your blog, which just adds to your existing pre-scheduled 52 posts. Voila!

Makes sense?

Me, on the other hand, I get bored very quickly, and my wife and I have observed that every 2 years, I get the 'itch' to move on to something new, to learn a new discipline or whatever. This new itch has taken me to the podcasting/vidcasting space.

Still blogging, mind you - as my podcasts and vidcasts will publish to a blog for easy rss/xml feeds - but I'm moving past just text.

That's one of the reasons why I've launched www.ShermanLive.com - a new podcast published to a Wordpress blog, with a purpose of simplifying and demystifying new media (blogging, podcasting, vidcating, screencasting, social networking, etc) so business owners so they can profit from it.

Maybe its blogging ADD, maybe its boredom, and I joke that 'blogging is so yesterday', but in reality, it still rocks and if biz owners would just consider blogs and blogging as a super website on steroids that builds community, that can help you boost your search engine results, traffic, sales and profits - then they would continue  to publish good, fresh content - even irregularly.

Blog on!"

On May 16, 2007, Typepad released on its official blog a new feature: Pages. Ken McCarthy (Founder, The System Seminar) alerted me to this announcement, and was curious if Wordpress offered a similar feature.

The good news is now Typepad users finally have the ability to create Pages. The Typepad blog offers several great ways one can use Pages, and more of my members can also benefit from understanding how to use a Page.

The other good news is Wordpress users have had this feature - forever, as long as I can remember.

How do you access this feature in Wordpress?

After logging in to your blog, click on the 'Write' tab, 'Pages' subtab.

Just like writing a new 'Post', you would simply fill out your Title, Body Content, Name of your Page (aka Page Slug), click the 'Publish' button and you're done!

In addition, on the Typepad blog, they announced a new feature -  "you can even set a Page to be the home page for your blog, so it’s the first thing readers see when they go to your URL." - aka Static Home Page, or Static Front Page.

I've used this feature via plugins for as long as I can remember, probably since 2004. Since I'm a fan of this Professional Theme/Plugin Set for Wordpress, there's a Static Front Page plugin that comes packaged with it. Simply writing and publishing a new Page, and using the word 'home' in the 'Page Slug' field (right column of 'Write' > 'Page' screen), it produces a static home page for me that offers a welcome page for my new visitors.

This static home page gives you the freedom to publish text, pictures, audio and/or video to direct visitors to the important sections of my blog/s, which includes suggestions to my visitor to subscribe to my blog feed or to my newsletter.

Currently, Wordpress has built in a static home page feature in its core feature set. I still prefer using the Static Front Page plugin from Denis (search for 'static front page' at semiologic.com), but here's Wordpress' explanation on how to create a static home page with their method.

For bloggers using Typepad, congrats! For Wordpress users and Semiologic Pro Theme users, it's just business as usual

This morning on Techmeme, I noticed that the New York Times posted an article by Barbara Whitaker entitled “Can Blogs Become a Source of Jobs?” The article is a cursory look at best at the emerging market of professional bloggers and people being hired as bloggers within companies. We here at Bloggers For Hire have seen this emerge since we began a few years ago.

More and more companies are looking to experts in the area of social media. Communication departments are hiring bloggers to coordinate with advertising, PR and marketing departments to relay the corporate message to their customers, clients and other consumers.

The article relates this to other areas of job hunting and hiring practices:

If pursuing a job as a blogger seems financially precarious, having blogging skills doesn’t hurt when it comes to looking for work — particularly in publishing, marketing, public relations and the news media.

Many friends were quoted in the article and they are also out there evangelizing the idea that hiring bloggers or employing bloggers is a new way of looking at key aspects of the online world where companies are eager to join.

 

Tags: advertising, Bloggers For Hire, Blogging Jobs, Blogs, Hiring Bloggers, marketing, PR, Professional Bloggers, Social Media, Techmeme

Many people are hired as bloggers. They post there experience and reviews regarding a particular brand or item which is very useful for many people. Like if one wants to know about cheap hosting site then they can read about it and get help from such web hosting review or blogs. There are many companies which are providing web hosting services to their customers online and the most famous one is godaddy. Such providers give multi quality services to their customers such as domain name registration, file transferring, website design, etc... The web hosting providers have dedicated server; on this server backup software is installed to present data disaster or data loss.

I recently ran across a post by Hillel at Jackson Fish Market regarding thoughts on hiring a blogger instead of trying to find a high priced MBA to spend all your money on a marketing campaign. I think the advice given to his friend that wanted to hire someone to handle a marketing campaign was solid advice.

Instead of hiring this person you could hire a “blogger plus”. In other words… you start a blog targeted at your target audience. It’s not about your offering per se… It’s from your company and all about the trials and tribulations of being a member of your target audience and what they spend their time doing. In fact, the best person would be a former member of that audience talking about how hard it is. Someone with personality and excellent communication skills. In addition to furious blogging (I mean 3-5 short posts per day, 5 days a week) they would troll discussion boards and forums targeted at your audience making several relevant posts a week. They could also do podcasting and videoblogging if they had interesting ideas that would best be expressed in those forms. The url should be it’s own, and not a subdomain of your main site. The blog would be “brought to you by Your Company”

This is exactly the pitch we give to many of our companies that approach us for our help in a marketing campaign through the use of professional bloggers.

 

Tags: Blog Marketing, Hiring Bloggers, Professional Bloggers, Social Media, Social Media Marketing