Business blogging is a different kettle of fish to blogging for money and that, in turn, is entirely different to blogging socially. The type of blog you manage will determine the voice, design, and style of your blog as well as the efforts you’re likely to put into promoting it.

A business blog needs to be professional as well as appear it. Regular posting on topics that your readers will genuinely find interesting can promote you as an expert in your field. A blog can keep the line of communication between you and potential customers open. It enables you to post relevant, keyword rich postings that encourage new traffic and help increase your client base.

It’s far from an exhaustive list but below are ten tips to remember when blogging for business:

1 – Set Your Goals Early

In just about every guide you ever read it says “set your goals”; it might be a clich? but it’s true. With a business blog your most likely goal is to increase sales but other worthy goals can include:

* Communicating with your existing or potential clients.
* Relaying company news.
* Answering queries and questions.
* Providing guides for current customers.
* Providing a portal to everything useful related to your industry.

The design of your site, type of content to include, whether or not to include ads, and numerous other decisions will be governed by the reason that you start blogging. The sooner you realize what it is that you want to achieve, the sooner you’ll achieve it.

2 – Use SEO Friendly URLs And SEO Plugins

WordPress is an invaluable SEO tool. It is a dedicated Content Management System but, more than that, it has a team of frighteningly dedicated users that create themes, plugins, widgets, and more and then provide them for free of charge to other users. Among these tools are a great number of SEO related tools that can be used to determine your meta description and title tags.

A simple but potentially effective SEO fix is to change the format of permalinks or URLs so that they dispense with the default page id to be replaced with an easier to read and keyword optimized page URL. You can do this through the WordPress dashboard.

3 – Consider Your Media Placement

Adding photos and illustrations, logos, videos, and other forms of media are great for reader engagement but you should consider each of your blog assets and place the most valuable and useful in the most prominent position. The quicker you can grab a reader’s attention, the more likely you will be to keep it for longer.

Certain themes allow you to easily embed video and slideshows into the sidebar of your blog and this can be a very useful tool to make your pages appear more attractive while relaying genuinely useful information.

4 – Consider Your Ad Placement

The primary target of a business blog is not usually to make money directly through the blog itself. Therefore, the placing of third party ads is not necessarily a good choice. However, you can add ads for your own company or service as well as partner websites. You can even add banners to specific categories, tags, or pages in your blog. Don’t overdo the number of banner ads and other distracting advertisements though and try to keep the interface clean and professional.

5 – Offer Your Readers The Chance To Pass You Around

Add me, share this, retweet, and email this functions should be provided to your users. When you post something useful and one of your readers shares it, it has the potential to go viral and create a lot of exposure for your blog and therefore your website and your business. This works especially well with highly unique content and can be text, audio, video…

Some themes have these functionalities built into them, but do ensure that they’re enabled. Alternatively find a sidebar widget or a social bookmarking plug-in that offers the same features and install this. Many blog readers read a number of blogs regularly and by enabling them to add you to social bookmarking and social networking sites you may well develop a long term relationship with them while also letting them inform others of what you offer.

6 – Keep Quality Content Coming

Try to set yourself a regular schedule but remember that it can be broken and it can be added to when necessary. If news breaks then post your own commentary on it. If you intersperse product reviews and articles that relate to your own business then try to schedule these. Make sure you post regularly, at the very least once a week, and spend some time getting involved in the community that builds up around your blog.

7 – Not Every Post Need Be An Advert

As long as you fill your blog with relevant, interesting, and well written posts then visitors will take the time to look around, read a few posts, and even click the ads to your own site in order to see exactly what you have to offer. Not every single post needs to include multiple links to your website pages.

You can download plugins that increase the likelihood of users reading more posts. Some add a list of related posts to the bottom of each entry while many themes provide the chance to show “most popular” and “most commented” posts to further direct the flow of traffic around your blog.

8 – Respond Where Responses Are Expected Or Deserved

Managing a blog is more than posting a missive of the week’s news every Friday. No matter how often you post you should spend some time interacting with the community that develops around your blog. Answer questions and queries, offer insight, and provide a response where one is requested.

A business blog should always be professional which means keeping posts and messages that are too personal away. Similarly, spam comments can prove extremely damaging for your SEO as well as the trust your readers place in your business. There’s decent spam settings in WordPress and you can further extend these.

9 – Stuck For Inspiration? Immerse Yourself In Web 2.0

More specifically read forums and blogs, wikis and news sites related to your own industry. Look for those news stories, articles, and videos that you like the most and are relevant to your blog and write about them. Read the comments in your own blog and look through your analytics to determine the pages that are most popular with readers.

Look at emerging keywords and news topics and try to act quickly. Slant the resulting article in favor of your business, if possible, and then post this to your blog too. There’s plenty of online portals and sites for news in your industry and you can use email updates, RSS readers, and browser or home page plug ins to display them regularly and in an orderly and comprehensible way.

10 – Blogging Is Great For Business But Business Is Also Great For Business

Getting stuck into a blog and truly developing your blog community can be a great way to build traffic to your website and develop clients for your business. Reading related blogs and becoming an active member in social networks can help you find out what your readers want and deliver it frequently.

Blogging and web 2.0 in general can quickly become addictive. It should be treated as a tool to assist in managing your online business which means that you need to concentrate on the other aspects of your business. Outsource your blog development and content creation if necessary and enjoy the results.

Author: Matt Jackson

There’s one area that many entrepreneurs slip upon and that’s about knowing how effective their ads are.

It’s essential that you analyse your ads from front to back so you could answer that question immediately anyone asked it. You need to analyse your ads for each element in this list:

** What they say and how they say it

** The headline and sub head

** The pre head

** If your Unique Selling Point is really clearly presented

** What action you want the prospect, visitor or customer to take

So, you have done all that and that’s great. But it is even more important that you move to the next stage and start to monitor two things: first how much the ads cost you to run, and second the exact conversion rate into hard cash in terms of sales.

It’s all about control:

Thinking your ads are effective doesn’t cut it. You need to have exact figures because that gives you a control you can work with. What do I mean by that? Well in this context, a control is your basic offer, headline, and copy that has brought you some sort of return.

Having that information means you can now start to cut your cost per sale by testing different variations of each element. Now that doesn’t mean changing everything all at once, in fact it’s vital you don’t because then you are not going to know which particular item is working, or failing.

Best place to start? I always jump in and change just the headline. Just doing that and comparing it to the original headline gave us 16 times more results on one of our landing pages than the original headline did.

How often do you change your headlines? Check what you are currently using and then run a test with a new one, I will bet you can come up with an even better headline when you sit down and think about it.

That headline is the first thing a visitor sees so it has to have impact because it’s what you are going to be judged by. It doesn’t matter how experienced you are at marketing, it is easy to underestimate the poewr of having a hard hitting, attention grabbing headline.

You have got around 6 seconds to interest any visitor to your website before they decide to stay – or go. That’s why a killer headline is essential, and I suggest you also experiment with a pre head and a sub head.

For examples of what I am talking about, visit a few sites and look at their sales page and shopping cart and you will generally see how a mixture of attention grabbing headlines, sub heads and pre heads.

In our own business we definitely want to draw attention to specifics in the copy, so we have added in other text elements like bullets, lists, bold and italic and recently we have incorporated video as well.

Don’t stop there: Once you start using your control pages, there is so much you can test. Every single element of your sales page can be analysed, and your copy has six distinct area’s that you can test:

- The Headline

- Your Story or Pitch

- The Proposition

- The Offer

- The Guarantee

- The Call To Action

As I have said before, for me the best place to start is with your headline. It’s the simplest to do and can produce quick and substantial results. Having got that killer headline then you can begin writing alternative messages that you can include in the other five components of your sales copy.

So what do you have to do in order to get that 60 percent increase I talked about in the headline? Simple maths shows you that by repositioning each of the six components could each give you a 10% boost to your sales, and multiply that by the six elements and you could soon see a 60% increase in your success rate.

Actually, you could do even better than that because I have experienced increases of up to 16 times, not percentages but times improvement, by adjusting and monitoring all the copy elements in a sales page.

Once you compound all of the improvements that you have carried out to that page then you could very quickly see a very different profit picture on your business.

Building a great landing page should be on top of your priority list if you want your website visitors transformed into customers.

While a great looking website can grab the attention of your visitors, a strong landing page will keep them involved and get them to buy your products/services.

Wikipedia defines a landing page as:

The page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link. The page will usually display content that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link, and that is optimized to feature specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search engines.

Wikipedia’s definition sums it up nicely but there is certainly more to a great landing page then relevant and keyword rich content. Here are 10 things that you should be looking at when optimizing a landing page:

- Relevant Content

A landing page’s content should be directly related to organic search results, PPC campaign, anchor text in inbound links and any other targeted inbound advertising, online and offline. If people don’t get what they expect, they will be more likely to leave.

- Multiple Landing Pages

A landing page shouldn’t necessarily be your homepage. In many instances a homepage is a good landing page. However, for more targeted traffíc and better results, you want a landing page to be focused on a specific offering and specific call for action. To accomplish this, a given website should have multiple landing pages. Create some deep link landing pages that will focus on a specific proposition and your conversion rate will be higher.

- Focus on Functionality

More and more visitors seem to judge the professionalism and credibility of a site by its design. To satisfy this, many website owners concentrate on the design aspect instead of focusing on its functionality. A well-designed landing page is essentially worthless if the prospect can’t accomplish anything. While I wouldn’t suggest skimping on the design, it shouldn’t be your priority. Focus on the exact steps you want your visitor to take and design a page with that in mind.

- Call To Action

You got visitors to your landing page, now direct them to take action. Make it clear and highly noticeable without overwhelming your audience. Whether it’s a sign-up form or a “buy now” button, make it the focus of your page.

- Send a Clear Message

Keep your landing page clean and clutter free so your visitors stay focused on your message. Emphasize the biggest reasons that they should carry out the applicable call to action with larger text, contrasting colors, images. Make it easier for them to scan the content by using lists and getting right to the point.

- Provide Incentive

Bribing your visitors with freebies and samples is a proven method of enticing them to sign up. Provide more than your competition but don’t sell yourself short either. Provide a list of reasons why your offering is better and what exactly the visitor can expect. Provide references and testimonials.

- Make Visitors Stay

Avoid sending your visitors to another page unless it is absolutely necessary. That includes any internal navigation as well as external banners. If you eliminate all distractions and limit navigation options, you stand a better chance of keeping your visitors around.

- Simple is Better

Make it easy for your visitors to complete the action you want them to. Less confusion and decision making for your visitor means better conversions rate for your landing page. Don’t provide multiple choices and throw in optional extras. Focus on the pitch the page was created for.

- Power of Freebies

Everyone likes free offers. They are hard to resist and can be a powerful conversion tool. Whether a call to action is free or something free is receíved as a result of carrying out a call to action, it certainly doesn’t hurt. If your competition charges for something and you provide it for free, you’ll win the customer. Remember, just because you make a free offer doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be quality.

- Testing

In a recent post “How to Turn Website Visitors into Buyers”, I’ve stressed how important testing is in finding out what your visitors like. Testing various text, call to action forms, layouts will give you a true idea what produces the best results as far as conversion.

Using a tool like Google’s Website Optimizer you can easily monitor the conversion rate, bounce rate, and tons of other useful metrics found in most modern day web analytics apps. Using these metrics you can easily figure out which version will be your optimal page, one that maximizes the results.

Creating a successful and effective landing page takes a lot of work but should be the focus for anyone involved with a website. Whether you are a website owner, web designer, web developer or a web marketing specialist you must be aware of the components that comprise a solid landing page. After all this can mean a website’s success or failure.