So, you’ve written your new blog article, now the question is – how do you get people to come and read it? One way to attract attention is to spend some time thinking about your blog categories and tags, but what are they and how can they be used?

Categories: Categories are the internet’s equivalent of a filing system. You can create your own category list, which should consist of very broad headings that cover a wide range of topics. A good example would be one category for each key business area and a miscellaneous.

These categories will form a key part of your website’s navigation strategy. Every blog should be filed under one category only, allowing those who visit your site to easily navigate to the content they want.

Tags: Tags work in tandem with your categories to provide more detail. They are more specific and can cover as many topics as necessary; however, there should not be multiple tags on the same topic. For example, an art blog should choose between ‘drawing’ and ‘sketching’ as a tag and use the same one across all relevant posts.

Tags are a search tool; they enable a customer to type in their keyword of interest and instantly see everything relevant your blog holds. If used effectively they can not only help you gain traffic, but ensure that visitors are seeing exactly what they want to see.

Talk to Write My Site if you would like to explore business blogging, article marketing or web content. All work is covered by our Quality Guarantee to ensure you’re 100% satisfied with your content.

I usually write about online marketing on this blog, but for a change I thought I’d address some of the wider issues of marketing as a whole.

In this two-part blog series, I’m going to discuss 10 classic marketing mistakes often made by small businesses.

1.     An untargeted approach

One of the biggest marketing mistakes is not really knowing who you’re trying to sell to. Too many businesses get wrapped up in the details of their product or service and do not spend enough time defining which group of prospective customers is likely to want to buy them.

Unless you have a marketing budget the size of Coca Cola’s, you will not be able to sell your products and services to everyone. Much better to choose a niche market that has the desire and the budget for what you’re offering.

2.     Relying on advertising

Advertising is expensive and usually ineffective unless you’re sustaining a high profile campaign where your brand will receive repeated exposure. There are other ways of gaining the exposure without spending money on expensive TV or print ads. PR, for example, is a way of generating free editorial about your business: in order to generate it, you need to become the first source of information about your industry. Run workshops, seminars and webinars in your area of expertise, and provide the press with free advice articles for them to publish in your name. And, of course, update your blog with quality content to demonstrate your industry knowledge.

3.     Relentlessly pursuing the hard sell

Nothing will alienate prospects faster than the hard sell. Building relationships is what will generate clients for your business. Nobody likes being sold to and your prospects will simply switch off when you start broadcasting to them. Instead, offer them the benefit of your expertise, and sell to them by helping them rather than by advertising to them.

4.     Poor communication

If a prospect has taken the trouble to contact you with an enquiry about your service, respond promptly and professionally. Don’t be hard to get hold of – this will come across as arrogant. If you can’t be in the office to answer every phone call, hire a VA or an answering service – it’s worth every penny.

When you send emails to prospects, make sure they’re personalised and addressed directly to the recipient – and again, make sure you contact them promptly. Sounds obvious, I know, but I’ve been addressed as “Hi there” in emails that have arrived two weeks after I’ve made an enquiry with a potential supplier, and trust me, it’s less than impressive.

5.     Not gaining the prospect’s trust

People like to ‘try before they buy’ – especially if they don’t know you and don’t have any reason to trust you. This is easy when you sell products in a shop, but can be more difficult when you sell a service. Think about what you can offer in lieu of a physical demonstration, such as a free consultation, a free e-book, or a free ticket to an event you’re running. Note the word ‘free’: it’s very important! For example, we offer free blog writing and SEO copywriting samples so that prospects can see the quality of our work for themselves.

Write My Site has today issued a press release, analysing the results of the latest studies into corporate blogging habits, namely that:

• 80% of corporate blogs are never populated with more than 5 articles; and

• 75% of European organisations have yet to add blogging into the marketing mix

Please visit our Press section to read the full release, and use the contact details in the footer for any enquiries.

The main aim of a business blog is to bring customers to your website and to associate your brand with their requirements. Therefore, the more regular readers you have, the more word-of-mouth you are likely to attract and the more successful your blog will be. So how can you turn casual readers into a fan club?

One of the most crucial points of your business blog for grabbing readers is the ‘call to action’, usually a single word that inspires a reader to join your blog. The most popular term in Internet parlance is ‘subscribe’, which can cause confusion among some readers. Off-line, subscriptions usually incur a financial charge, whereas you want your readers to sign up for free. You may like to consider ‘join’ or ‘follow’ as less loaded alternatives. This will apply both within your blog and any ‘sign-up’ buttons.

As variety is the spice of life, it’s best to offer several ways to follow your business blog. RSS is a relatively new technology, popular among web-savvy clients, but not currently accepted into popular use. For clients who aren’t up to speed – you may like to offer an email subscription feed, which follows a more traditional format.

Like most aspects of creating a business blog, your two key aims are to be clear and inclusive. If you apply this to your language, your overall tone and your formatting you’ll quickly see passers-by turn into pals.

Remember Write My Site offers a full blog management service if your business wants to add blogging into the marketing mix. Tariffs start from just £150 per month.

What’s the first thing you think about when writing a blog for business? The answer should be your audience. No matter who your target demographic is, they are always your number one priority in creating content. A business blog is different from a personal blog, in that it should aim to generate a following, not simply to share the latest goings-on within the company with anyone who’s interested (sadly, few people outside of the business will care whether you’ve changed stationery suppliers).

Once you’ve identified your audience, your first question should be; How can I capture their interest? Statistics, jokes, anecdotes and rhetorical questions all serve to create an engaging introduction. You just need to decide which is most likely to appeal to your audience. A scientific-minded group may be grabbed by a startling statistic; younger audiences by an anecdotal joke.

A typical reader will have time constraints and probably the same relatively short attention-span that applies to most web-users. Therefore, to accommodate them you need to write clearly and concisely. While good writing is essential, a business blog is not the place for linguistic hyperbole or fancy ideas. Overdressing your content in metaphors, similes and long-winded sentences creates a diversion, ultimately distracting the reader and weakening your message.

Business blogs should aim to be interactive, and appeal to readers’ imaginations. To reinforce this connection you next want to address your tone. An overtly formal tone can over-complicate sentences and seem patronising. Keep a relatively conversational tone, free of slang, buzz words or jargon. The latter is especially important if your audience is non-specialist, as technical terms can be extremely alienating.

Putting yourself in the reader’s place will greatly enhance your business blog writing and increase interest in your website. Just bear in mind at all times – there is no ‘I’ in blog.

With more than 350 million active users, Facebook is almost certainly populated by a good chunk of your customer base. The social networking giant is free to use, and has recently introduced “fan” pages for businesses.

Setting up a Facebook fan page is easy: simply click on this link and follow the instructions. The real question is why should you set one up? Here are five reasons why setting up a Facebook fan page could be a great move for your organisation:

1)    Free of charge. It costs nothing but a few minutes of your time to create a Facebook fan page and to send the link to all your contacts.

2)    Effective list-builder. Everyone who becomes a fan will have your page listed on their profile. Given that the average Facebook user has 130 friends*, you can introduce your business to 13,000 people with just 100 fans.

3)    Shout louder. Won an award? Received some favourable press coverage? Announce it on your Facebook page and have the news picked up by your fans in real-time.

4)    Direct customer feedback. E-commerce retailers in particular can benefit from speedy feedback from customers when they post photos and descriptions of new products.

5)    Blog promotion. If you have a business blog, you can post links to each update from your Facebook fan page and benefit from extra traffic to your website.

To see a Facebook fan page in action, have a look at ours (and become a fan if you like what you see!). We use it primarily to raise the profile of our blog, whereas several of our clients use theirs to research new product and service ideas, or to build up their database of contacts.

Talk to Write My Site about managing a Facebook fan page for your business.

*http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

There are hundreds of blogs out there, all clamouring for your readers’ attention. So how can you make yours stand out from the crowd? Here’s a quick guide to making maximum impact with minimum fuss.

First of all, be concise. This is not just dictated by your word-limit, but also by the demands of selling. Your readers will all have time demands of their own and will probably be only scanning your article and so you need to get your point across quickly and clearly to make an impression.

There are several ways to achieve this effect. The most obvious is to keep your sentences short.  Brief sentences keep arguments digestible and easy to follow. They also force you to be direct in your writing, cutting out all elements of ‘purple prose’ and unnecessary adjectives. Too many adjectives can cloud an argument, distance a client and blunt your message. Be ruthless. If it has no grammatical purpose and doesn’t add information to your sentence – cut it out.

Blogs are designed to persuade and provoke; therefore if you truly want to engage with your reader then express your point of view. In allowing for all contingencies you create flabby writing which doesn’t put your message across clearly. As a result, your company is projected as weak and indecisive. So pick an angle and make your case. Not only will your writing be much clearer than if you equivocate, you’ll also be more likely to provoke discussion amongst your reader.

Applying simple rules such as these can have a big impact on your blog and the way your message is perceived, memorised and acted upon.

Remember Write My Site offers a full blog management service if your business wants to add blogging into the marketing mix. Tariffs start from just £150 per month.

A blog is one of the fastest and easiest ways to grow your web presence and provides a superb platform for your business to engage potential customers, without resorting to the hard sell. A recent study of 1,500 SMEs found that blogging increased website traffic by an average of 55%. Furthermore, the average company that blogs has 97% more inbound links and a massive 434% more indexed pages than the average company which does not blog.

Having a blog on your website brings huge benefits. However, with only 250-ish words to get your point across (the best blog posts are brief), how can you make your blog stand out and best reflect you?

Before starting you should have identified your main target demographic, as this will largely dictate the tone of voice you adopt within your blog articles. Consultancy businesses may wish to take an advice-led approach to display their expertise, for example. Whatever your decision, make sure your chosen voice is an authentic representative of you; there is no point writing in a ‘teenage’ voice if your business is a luxury catering service.

Once you have your style, you want to look at your substance. Blogs should contain certain keywords that will get your site ranked by the search engines, but without becoming a blatant sales platform. They are an amazing way to show off a wider knowledge to your customers, informing, helping and sparking debate. For example, if you sell wedding dresses, you may wish to highlight new catwalk shows, provide handy hints on finding the ideal accessories or ask if white really is the best colour for the big day.

Finally, remember that blogs are interactive, so don’t be afraid to express an opinion and start a debate. However, do try to present a balanced argument; it lends your blog credence and inspires thoughtful and considered responses.

Remember Write My Site offers a full blog management service if your business wants to add blogging into the marketing mix.

Google and Twitter have announced a partnership which will give Google access to the full feed of every user’s “tweets”. The move is the strongest indication yet that the search engines are moving towards real-time search results.

Google has already been pipped to the post by new search engine Bing, which has already made Bing Twitter Search available in the US and has signed a deal with Facebook to add public Facebook updates to its search results.

Probably the best explanation for why real-time data has become so important to the search engines comes from Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch. Here’s what he had to say on the topic: “Tweets and other real-time data streams are valuable to Google and Bing because for many types of searches (news, events, sports, stocks, shopping, etc.), the most recent information is often the most relevant.

“And it’s hard to beat millions of people Tweeting out their thoughts … for real-time information about every subject imaginable. Google and Bing need access to this stream of data if they want to keep their results fresh and relevant.”

Google, of course, has already taken a couple of steps towards real-time search. Users performing Google searches can now filter their results to display only pages posted within a specific time-frame – even as recently as the previous seven days. They can also choose to search only blog results as opposed to all web results.

The shift towards real-time search has fairly obvious repercussions for the digital marketing and SEO industries. If a business wants a presence in the search results it needs to make sure it is adding regular content both to its own website and to social media platforms. Static web pages could soon be displayed so far down the search results as to be virtually invisible ….

1)    It’s gotta be regular! If you want your website to appear anywhere in Google, you MUST update it with fresh SEO content on a regular basis. At a minimum, you need to be adding content to your site once a week – if you can do it more often, that’s even better. The operative word here is “adding”. There’s a mistaken belief in some circles that you should re-write your existing pages on a regular basis, when in fact it’s adding new content that will really boost your chances in the search engines. Try to ensure that the majority of your SEO content is unique. It’s OK to post an occasional piece of content from another site but keep in mind that Google is looking for sites with something original to say.

2)    Write a blog. A lot of websites are “static”, i.e. basic brochure-style sites with content that don’t really need embellishing or updating. Installing a blog is therefore a neat solution to the problem of needing to add regular content. The blog can have its own section on the site (www.sitename.co.uk/blog) and any number of posts can be added without disrupting the overall usability of the website. If you use a CMS (Content Management System) like Wordpress for your blog, you’ll find it’s as easy to use as Microsoft Word. Lace your blog articles with your keywords and link those keywords to other pages of your site for extra SEO brownie points.

3)    Say something useful. A business blog is only as good as the topics it writes about. After all, you want the readers to engage with your carefully crafted SEO content and subsequently take an interest in your products and services. What do your customers find interesting and useful? The reason our own SEO content focuses on blogging is because we’re a team of article writers and blog writers and we want to attract readers who share our interests. Don’t make the mistake of using your business blog as your personal diary. Your blog needs a consistent theme that’s relevant to the needs and interests of its readership.