How important is your blog?

I continue to have some difficulties with clients who do not understand that their blog is more important than their web site and that said blog should be the hub of all their social media activity.

The San Francisco blogger who landed on the front page of the Financial Times would probably not have received that distinction, no matter how badly her house had been vandalized, if it had not been for the fact that she named the private home rental company in a post about her horrible experience. It so happened that the company is in the middle of attracting millions in new investment and search engines being what they are . . ., the blogger’s post popped up!

That’s where you need to be, dear client! No, not with a vandalized home and not even necessarily in the Financial Times (although one could do worse!), but on the first page of a Google search. Your blog is far more likely to get you there than your web site.

When you blog . . . (three cardinal rules):

Your readers will have to become convinced that you know what you’re talking about (or they won’t come back for more).

Your readers will have to become convinced that your motives are pure, that you want to inform (a new tomato sauce recipe, review of a new tech gadget you have tried and like), entertain (make them laugh, or at least smile and nod their heads), and engage (your readers become aware that you truly care about them and want to hear back from them); if your motivation is to sell . . ., you’re losing readers!

Write clearly and with conviction, with proper grammar, spelling, punctuation and syntax and without hype, jargon, self-promotion, clichés or verbosity.

That’s all! See how easy it is?

Practice What You Teach!

The other day, in a local art studio, I picked up a flyer for a “Marketing Online Workshop” – very basic stuff (web site, blog, social media), a reasonable fee, and an instructor whose name I had not heard before. A few minutes’ search told me that neither teaching nor online marketing are her areas of expertise. I have no questions about her effectiveness and success as a business owner and suspect that she is very good at what she does, but I wonder why an online marketing course should be taught be someone who launched her own blog in January 2009, has posted only 4 times (most recently on January 16, 2009) and has only 1 “follower” (herself).

Shouldn’t we all, as business professionals, practice what we teach?

Improving your LinkedIn profile and your e-mail address

How often do you review a LinkedIn profile of a colleague or a potential business partner or new hire and you see that he/she has the following under “Websites”:

My Website
My Company
My Blog
My Portfolio

Often, right?

It would so much better project a professional image, if this section instead revealed:

The web site’s name or expertise (e.g. orchids for every occasion)
The company’s name (e.g. Sailing for Fun, Inc.)
The blog’s name (e.g. The Accidental Gardener)
The portfolio’s focus (e.g. business coaching around the world)

This is easy to accomplish (just change the name, retain the URL) and the profile owner comes across as being more professional than most. If this is a tweak you should make, do it; it will set you apart from the competition.

Sort of the same thing with e-mail addresses.

If your e-mail address is info@xyz.com, or your web site offers contact choices of info@, sales@, quotes@, etc., you may miss inquiries that could lead to sales. Business depends on personal relationships; people want to do business with people, not with characters. sam@xyz.com or suzie@xyz.com is bound to generate more interest than info@xyz.com.