Building your business’ reputation through blogging isn’t like those Fidelity commercials where the people look down, and all of a sudden there’s a green path, telling them exactly where to go. It’s not like the State Farm commercials where you can repeat a simple jingle, and someone appears to solve all your problems. Often the path is unclear. The right decisions can make you look like a genius, while the wrong ones can cripple. It’s a high-risk, high-reward game that takes patience and persistence to win.
The key is to stay active
While we don’t always have the right answers, we can at least study our options, analyze each one, and make the best decision possible. We have to keep moving and look for ways to attain better results.
This means:
- Asking questions.
- Exploring ideas.
- Developing strategies.
- Paying attention to what’s around us.
Analysts always say it’s tough for NFL teams to win a Super Bowl two years in a row. (read more…)
It can be tempting to look at the major bloggers in your space and despair, thinking to yourself that you’ve missed your window of opportunity, that the big guys have it all sewn up and it’s too late for you to make your mark.
But at a New Media Expo panel in Las Vegas, Robert Scoble and Mitch Joel told attendees just the opposite: With a little persistence, solid planning and creativity, you too can amass a social media following that takes your brand to the next level.
A few of their tips:
Take a “pile of pennies” approach to growth. Scoble says that building a following is like stacking pennies. Imagine if you started a month by placing a penny on a table, came back the next day and increased the stack to two pennies, and then four and then eight. None of those tasks is particularly difficult, but if you managed to keep at it, by the end of a 31-day month you could have nearly $11 million in pennies. (read more…)
Networking is a critical part of blogging as you build a stronger following on social media and solicit related blogs for guest posts. However, it can be time consuming to find all of the relevant contact information you need in the midst of managing a busy to-do list, let alone knowing how to find additional blogger contacts among your social media followers. Thankfully, there are a bunch of tools around that will help you maximize the impact of your contacts and networking efforts.
Here are six you can start using to improve your networking with fellow bloggers.
Combine social networking with e-mail. Before you send an e-mail to a new contact, it is extremely helpful to find out everything you can about that person, and a tool such as Rappaportive makes that easy to do. This plug-in to your Gmail account pulls up the social media information for each contact as you compose a message. (read more…)
I was a creative writing minor in college — I wanted something practical to fall back on in case my journalism career didn’t pan out. I might not have gotten the backup career I was angling for, but the training has served me well in more ways than I can count.
Creative writing teaches you to accept criticism, to distill complex ideas into small packages and to refine a concept again and again until it shines. More than anything else, however, it taught me to brainstorm. A good fiction program is a forced march of creativity. You can’t sit around in a meadow, waiting for the muse to sing in you — you’ve got heartless deadlines to meet. If you want to be a writer, you have to learn to fake it until you make it.
If you’re a professional blogger, I’ll bet that sounds sickeningly familiar. There are days when you feel like you couldn’t write another post about WidgetCorp if your mother’s life depended on it. (read more…)
Does your business have a blog? If you’re like most businesses, the answer is no. The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s research on blogging found that 23% of Fortune 500 companies and 37% of Inc. 500 companies had a blog in 2011, a decrease from 2010.
Examine the research, and you’ll find that 92% of businesses found blogs one of the most successful forms of social media, up from 86% in 2010. This should make you wonder the reason companies are cutting back on blogging. The answer is they didn’t. Rather, Inc. 500’s industrial composition changed in 2010 and 2011 toward more firms providing government services, a segment that blogs at 15%, compared with an overall average of 37%.
If you want to increase your business’ social media marketing effectiveness, persuade management to add a blog to your marketing mix with these seven reasons every business should blog, regardless of whether your firm is a business-to-consumer, business-to-business, nonprofit or solopreneur organization. (read more…)
Twitter
Facebook
Linkedin
RSS
