Blogs Perk Sales for High-Tech Coffee Mug

We’ve been saying blogs are serious business tools, and can help get your message out to more people faster than a traditional website. The story above is a case in point on how to use blogs to launch a new product by targeting the early adopters and influencers who are reading blogs now.

Build it and they will come?

The common mistake that so many people make is thinking “I’ll build a website and visitors will come.” That doesn’t work. Even if you optimize for search- it’s not enough to get you to the top- fresh content can help, but it’s really about building a network- links to other sites, communities, connections with your customers- that makes the traffic start to show up.

Think about who your target market is- and how to get them talking about your products or services- and then go out and make those connections. If your site is going to be your best salesperson- make it get out of the office- and network, network, network- and blogs are an excellent tool to accomplish that networking.

NewsForge | Choosing an open source CMS

The above link is an overview of the many Content Management Systems (CMS) that are available to run a website. All are open source software- meaning the source code is open to the public to tinker with and adapt for their particular use. Don’t think that open source just happens- there are huge communities of people sheparding the software to make sure it’s stable, secure and viable.

The key to these packages is that your site exists in a database- with the content extracted and formatted for display on the web as opposed to a hard coded site that is created one page at a time- and the pages don’t change.

We really like WordPress because of it’s simplicity. If you want to later move up to a more robust package- you can easily import your existing WordPress site into Drupal. The difference is, Drupal requires a geek to really make it sing- WordPress just works.

The article doesn’t really get into the main reasons we love the WordPress CMS so here are a few:

• Your site will automatically have RSS (Really Simple Synidication) so your readers can subscribe to your site and be notified any time you change or add material.
• Each time you post- WordPress automatically notifies Google that there is new information on your site and you get indexed.
• WordPress allows you to build 2-way communication via comments and trackbacks with people interested in your subject.
• Posting is as easy as writing a document in Microsoft Word- and that makes keeping your site up to date a snap.
• If you pay attention to your webstats, and use the Categories feature properly, you can end up on the front page of Google quite easily- at least it’s worked for us.

So- take a look at the article and it’s list of Content Management Systems- but, if you are new to having a database driven site- trust us- and start out with WordPress.

Seth’s Blog: How to get traffic for your blog.One of the things every blogger thinks they want is a lot of traffic. However, traffic, for traffic’s sake won’t help you grow your business- unless you are part of some google adsense pyramid scheme.

So- Seth Godin, the mack daddy of bloggers, has this post with “54 ways to build traffic to your blog” listed. Take a look- and of course realize that it’s really only 27 since almost everything he lists- also lists the opposite.

From my experience, the most important thing is to be quick to write about a subject that is fresh. Be the first, break the news, provide insight on something that just hit big in the media. For political bloggers- this is easy- for those of you writing about the latest news in local video production- it’s a little harder.

Always, stay on topic- and if you are using WordPress, think hard about your categories and use them (making sure you give each category description text in your manage/categories screen) on every post. Each post should fall into several categories.

Also- always make sure you alt tag your images- and links- with descriptions that blind people and search bots can understand. One site with content everyone was looking for was getting no hits- all because they didn’t have alt tags on their photos describing what the photos showed.

Seth is always interesting- too bad he’s closed comments and trackbacks- so I won’t get any hits from his traffic- oh, yeah- that’s another way to build traffic.