Online Marketing Blog

There are thousands of blog posts that get published every day and your posts are competing with them. Not only is good content needed, but so is a good image. Imagery can draw users attention to the content and give your post an additional boost.

Screenshots, logos, people, and product images are all good easy ways to incorporate imagery into a blog post. Almost anything is better than a big block of text.

When considering what type of image to add, think of what’s visually appealing. It may not always be a product shot, or a picture of a smiling person, quite possibly an image of the sky or an animal can convey the feeling you are trying to get across in your post much easier.

It’s never any fun to follow a link just to find out the page you were looking for can’t be found. Chances are, the user may spend a few seconds trying to find the correct page or just bail on the site. To ensure that visitors stay on your site, site owners should ensure that the 404 error page is friendly and helpful.

I did some research in the WordPress plug-in directory and came up with many plug-ins to enhance the default WordPress error page. However there were only two plug-ins that I could get to work and liked. The fist is Dunstan-style Error Page.

Dunstan-style Error Page

The Dunstan-style Error Page has a really nice layout that includes recent posts, a quick error report button, and a feedback form. It’s all built into the plug-in and there is nothing that needs to be configured.

Taglines are perhaps the most underrated and underused elements of personal and business blogs, yet they serve a huge function.

The social web has conditioned us to move through content-based sites quickly, and if we reach a site with an unclear thesis we’re likely to click to the next thing.  You also can’t count on visitors to read your “about” page.  In a world that increasingly moves at 140 characters or less, having a hook such as a clever tagline can make all the difference.

Taglines are your brand’s elevator pitch and help people get a quick snapshot of who you are. It’s your opportunity to be descriptive, catchy, memorable and create a unique brand for your blog.  They also present a great opportunity for keyword inclusion, but not at the sacrifice of stickiness.  Ideally you can combine something catchy and SEO friendly.

Like many others, I scoffed at Twitter when I first heard of it. What use could sending short messages to people I don’t know be?  The mental leap from IM and Facebook status updates to Twitter makes it easier, but business use seemed pointless at first.  As I noticed more of my Search, Social and PR industry peers using Twitter, it seemed a good idea to test out.

While I don’t have a million followers, or even 100,000, I’ve found out that for my purposes, quality is the key and the 13k or so followers I am lucky to be associated with are appreciated a lot more. Being strategically useful and helpful builds trust, attracts influential followers (vs bots and spammers) and results in a new channel for social networking.  Individual tweets may or may not be useful, but when you add them up over time, a bigger picture emerges.

WordPress, like any software, has the ability to break and that then can cause a blog owner quite a bit of anxiety. This can be caused by plugins not working properly, file corruption, database problems, or many other things. Even though your data is usually just fine, having a blog down is not what a blog owner wants.

Here are 5 things you can do to try to fix a broken WordPress Install.

Before trying to fix any issues, make sure to back up your blog! The fixes below should not cause any harm, but it’s always better to have a backup you don’t need than not to have a backup when you need it.

Items to back up:

• Your /wp-content/ folder

It seems that that there could be a lot more done with WordPress’ internal search. More results, better options, filters, or something to make the user experience better. So I started looking for options.

One option I found was Lijit. Lijit offers the ability to allow your users to search your blog, bookmarks, photos, videos, social networks such as Twitter, and other sites from one search box on your site. It seemed like what I was looking for, so I installed it.

The downside to Lijit is that it can give other sites more visibility via advertising or the web searches tab. And taking traffic off your site isn’t always a good idea. The upsides though are that you can include many blogs, social networks and all sorts of different things into your search results. Lijit makes it all about your network of sites, not just about one blog.

With the blogosphere churning out nearly 1 million posts every 24 hours, an unstoppable river of content flows over the web daily. It’s daunting, especially if you’re new to online publishing.  The good news is it’s still very possible to succeed, even if you’re just starting out today.

Developing affinity with a group of readers who will actually take the time to link, comment and share your material requires a commitment of both resources and creativity – this is common knowledge.

But all other things being equal, you can and should give yourself an extra advantage by developing a unique brand for your blog. This is beyond being organized and having a plan, this is about standing out in a world of infinite choice.

Did you know that you can post to a WordPress blog in a number of different ways? Here are 3 alternatives to create content in WordPress other than logging into the blog admin using the built-in editor.

Post via Email

Built into WordPress is the ability for the software to check an email account and post each message it finds to a blog. This serves as a quick and easy way to send an email message and publish new content.

To set this feature up, the fist thing you’ll need is a custom, secret, email account. Since WordPress posts everything that goes to this account, it can’t be one that serves more than one purpose, or that gets spam.

There are a lot of people that will tell you that you need a blog because it’ll perform better in search engines and gain more traffic. This is not completely false, but it’s not exactly true either.

Blogs tend to perform better because of the abundance of content. Blogs empower users to create content in a way that is easy and fun. By doing so, users are creating content on a daily, or weekly, basis.

More content means more traffic and links. This is more for search engines to index, more for users to link to, and more to share with their friends and co-workers.

More visitors can then lead to more sales and conversions. The more eyeballs that are in front of your content, the better the opportunity to turn them into your customer.

A while back we covered a plug-in called Subscribe To Comments.  It’s a great way to ensure that when visitors comment on your blog posts, they receive follow-up comments and stay a part of the conversation.

After using Subscribe To Comments for over a year, there was one major issue, fake email addresses.  Whether they are from people who didn’t want to leave their real email address, or from spammers, the number of bounce backs can become overwhelming.

The good news is there are developers out there that have taken the Subscribe To Comments plug-in to the next level.  They require a user to validate their email address before subscribing to the comments.  This ensures that they wanted to subscribe and that their email address is valid.

When thinking about a blog, one big thing that a lot of companies are concerned with is control. They are worried about what may get posted on their blog, and are concerned with people saying negative things about them in their comments. Companies get scared that it’s going to be mass chaos.  The good news is content can be easily controlled by properly setting up user rolls and comment moderation.

When a WordPress blog is stet up properly, some users can be free to create content, but not able to push it live. Other users can be given the power to publish, but only after they approve the post.  When it comes to comments, turning on the moderation feature will ensure that no comment makes it on the site without internal approval.  This allows a company to weed out comments that are not appropriate, or formulate responses to negative comments so the comment and company response both go live at the same time.

Starting a business blog is no easy task. There are lots of things to think about and lots of things to consider. Sometimes companies think to big to fast, which could be setting the blog up for failure before it even launches.

The key thing to remember when creating a new business blog is to start simple and then expand. Going from 0-60 in two seconds sounds like fun, but there are a lot of risks involved. It’s better to ease into it by focusing on creating good content, measuring growth, and learning how users interact with the blog.

Here are five things to think about when before creating your business blog.