Looking ahead to 2010, the fields of internet business and blogging are poised for dramatic growth. This is a huge opportunity for small business people, who are willing to enter the learning curve and grow their business. The bottom line is that you cannot afford to close your eyes to the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the internet itself.
Free business books
You don’t have to go to business school to find the tools and resources you need to succeed in your own industry. Whether you want to start your own company, apply for a management position or strengthen your basic career goals, you can turn to ebooks and other free business resources for help. Here are 50 free business books you really need to read.
Building your business blog
A blog is an online content management system that provides relevant news and information using a streamlined publishing process targeted at a specific audience. Most importantly a blog is interactive and that makes it an essential part of the new Web 2.0 marketing tools.
Setting up and maintaining a business web site and/or a blog is rapidly becoming standard practice for small to mid-sized businesses looking to establish their online presence and increase sales. Therefore, it’s important to avoid making business blogging mistakes.
Interesting results
According to research, 78 (15.6%) of the Fortune 500 are blogging as of 10/01/09. Fortune500BusinessBloggingWiki
Communicate Better, a content firm that offers custom writing services, surveyed 92 business owners regarding their opinion towards corporate blogs. While 82% of the respondents saw the value of blogs for SEO, customer loyalty, and branding benefits, the vast majority indicated they simply did not have skills or time to write, publish, and manage blog content.
This means that employees who have blogging skills will be the most desirable new hires in 2010.
The actual question asked was, “What 3 digital marketing channels and tactics will you emphasize in 2009?” Here are the top ten tactics selected:
• Blogging (34%)
• Microblogging (Twitter) (29%)
• Search engine optimization (28%)
• Social network participation (Facebook, LinkedIn) (26%)
• Email marketing (17%)
• Social media monitoring & outreach (17%)
• Pay per click (14%)
• Blogger relations (12%)
• Video marketing (10%)
• Social media advertising (7%)
Note that six of the ten tactics are in the social media marketing arena. Therefore, employees with blogging skills and a social media presence will be the most desirable new hires in 2010.
Questions and answers
- What’s the hype around business blogs?
- Why are businesses readily adopting blogging?
- What’s the tangible benefit of business blogging?
Blogware’s Chris Baggott and Rebecca Lieb, VP US Operations, Econsultancy of participated in a webinar about business blogging aimed at answering the three questions above. They received more questions from the participants than they were able to respond to. You will find the overflow questions and answers here.
If you are ready to become a better blogger and build a better blog then onecoolsite is the blog for you.
Related posts found in this blog:
Blogging is Big: Blogging Statistics
Twenty five steps to increase blog traffic
Blog Promotion Basics
Making Money Online During a Recession
Jan Husdal
December 7, 2009
As always, great posts on your blog.
Being a business blogger I particularly liked the link to the five business blogging mistakes. While I never fell for the first four, the hardest part has been the stay for the long haul. It has taken me more than a year of consistent regular, almost daily posting to attain a regular following and “getting noticed” by the big commercial players in the business I am in, to the point that they are now featuring little me on their blogs. It can take a while before blogging pays off, but when it does, there’s only one way: up.
timethief
December 7, 2009
@Jan
It’s great to hear from you. I’ve been wondering how you are doing. I think your recounting of your own blogging experience is valuable because these days everyone is looking for a “short-cut”. I learned the hard way that one can spend virtually their whole day promoting their newly published post in social media and in social networks only to be rewarded with a statistical peak followed by a dramatic drop. Without having the self control it takes to develop a social media time management strategy and the force of will to stick to it one can be caught up promotional efforts that produce the last thing we need ie. a sky high bounce rate.
Have a healthy and happy holiday season. :)
Jan
December 7, 2009
Doing fine here…just busy blogging :)
I’ve tried the artificial peaks road and it doesn’t work. Where I come from, some newspapers use twingly.com to have a “people blogging about this”-section below the articles on their website. This means that you can write about whatever and then link to and ping the newspaper articles, which creates a trackback link to your post, which, if it is read by enough people can create hits in the thousands…for nothing. None of these are likely to return to your blog in any case. Besides, I was spending more time scouring the newspapers for articles I could link to and then writing “something” than actually writing meaningful posts. In fact, my blog became much less focused when I was trying to make it fit with “current events”, which is not what I was blogging about anyway. Topically focused and regular posting, creating a slow and steady increase in regular and returning visitors is a better strategy and what works best in the end. It did for me.
And Happy Holidays to you, too!
timethief
December 7, 2009
@Jan
“Topically focused and regular posting, creating a slow and steady increase in regular and returning visitors is a better strategy and what works best in the end. ”
AMEN :)