Is your Blog an advertising platform? Maybe it should be.

Until you start getting a lot of traffic- you won’t be ready to sell ads on your site, but- maybe you might consider placing some ads to bring that traffic. However, if you are “the expert” on any one thing- you may just have the “Right” readers that someone wants to reach. Selling ads, not just Google Ad Sense placements, can be profitable- if you have an audience someone really wants to reach.

Consider this:

If you think blogs are not a viable ad medium, consider this: Many blogs are achieving “big media” reach. The celebrity gossip blog Perez Hilton, for example, or DailyKos have 500,000 readers a day, which is a quite a “big media” reach.

Read the full article The Value of Blog Advertising | MarketingProfs.com for more information. It also has tips on what to put in your blogad.
We’ll look more into advertising on blogs in the near future here- if you have questions about how to do this and can’t wait, give us a call.

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Write better posts!

Writing for me is easy. Writing for some of you is hard.

Creating great content is the key to getting more visitors- so all you English majors out there- rejoice, your diploma may be worth something again. Chris Pearson has a post about content that’s worth reading- so here is the link and an excerpt:

Pearsonified | Best damn blog on the planet.

When you first got into blogging, I’m betting that refining your copywriting skills was likely the last thing on your mind – I certainly wasn’t thinking about it! Five months in, however, I see that developing this skill will pay huge dividends in launching future ventures, regardless of whether they take place online or offline. Simply put, being able to write great copy is one of those transferable skills that I talked about last time – it can help to set you free.
Here are a few of our tips on building content:
  1. Some tips I find useful- google what you want to write about- and then write about what you find (that’s how this post is being done- with the help of the Pressit function of WordPress). You can also set up a Google alert on your subject to find things for you.
  2. Look at your webstats search terms- then combine them in new ways- with meaningful insight- which should help you promote your search rank in the future. See this post.
  3. Ask your readers questions- and see where they take you with their comments- I read a post by Mark Cuban today about the future of movies- he had over 568 responses. I wrote about it.
Those are just a few ideas-
if you have more suggestions- please feel free to share them as a comment below.

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Using WordPress collectively

Roles and Capabilities « WordPress Codex

Suppose you have 30 sales people in your company- and they are constantly sharing information they find on the web with the other sales people- via e-mail.

A sales person might send an e-mail to his peers:

Our competitor is bragging about their 6 million hits on their website monthly at site xyz- our web site has 6 million unique visitors- with way more hits. Go tell that to all the clients who are considering advertising on their site.

Instead- he could post it on his WordPress driven site- for all to see- with comparisons. Depending on his level- he could have different abilities to post:

  • Administrator – Somebody who has access to all the administration features
  • Editor – Somebody who can publish posts, manage posts as well as manage other people’s posts, etc.
  • Author – Somebody who can publish and manage their own posts
  • Contributor – Somebody who can write and manage their posts but not publish posts
  • Subscriber – Somebody who can read comments/comment/receive newsletters, etc.

If the sales manager wants to keep control of what his sales people post- or let legal take a look- he can make them all Contributors– and make the lawyers Editors.

The great thing about letting everyone post- is content drives visitors and higher search results- so a small company of 30, posting often can create a high ranked site in a short period of time. The key will be making sure the posts are all properly categorized- and that everyone makes a good effort not to duplicate content.

Copyrights must also be observed- making sure that all content is properly attributed.

It never hurts to also hire an “editor” to try to make different writing styles all fall into one corporate voice. Look to hire a freelance writer- who is familiar with WordPress to help keep your site as grammatically correct as possible.

If you are looking for an editor- we can connect you with a few (it might be good if we hired one of them too- note to self).

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