Roland Millward

Posts Tagged ‘wordpress’

Should you have a business blog?

Blogging is advancing! The original idea of blogging gave the impression of people who had little to do sitting at their computer and jotting down their personal thoughts and daily activities. However there is much more to blogging than the sort of thing you would expect to read in someone’s diary.

Blogging is now a business and many people can be described as professional bloggers. Take a look at the website Problogger where the creator of that site (Darren Rowse) has made a good living from it. Have you ever read some of the posts in Problogger? The purpose behind this article though is to show you the value of adding a blog to your business website. In the blog just like this one you can share ideas and give advice about the things you do in your business. As I train people to speak in public and also to use social media I can add value to my website with this blog. The articles produced in this blog can keep visitors coming back to the website to pick up tips and advice for free. With most business websites you are only likely to visit them when you want to buy something but with blogging you can create a need or desire for people to come to your site even if they are not yet customers.This gives you the opportunity to develop a relationship with people that are not your customers but could be or even recommend your services to others because of the relationship and trust that you have built up through your blog.

Your blog should also allow people to comment and share in your blog. It is also good if you can get guest writers to contribute to your blog as this gives variety to the articles you provide and will keep people coming back to read more. Make sure that you have a RSS feed that people can subscribe to as well as offer en email service to let people know when you have published new articles.

I would encourage everyone with blog to add articles regularly. At least once a week should be your aim. When you are in a writing mood it is a good idea to write several articles so that you can publish them on time at set intervals. WordPress allows you to schedule the publishing dates in advance so that you do not have to worry about doing that manually. How do you write your blog posts?

Writing a blog is not that difficult. All of us have the potential to be reasonably good writers. The basic principle of blogging is to share what you know. You will know a lot about your business and the field in which you operate. All you have to do is share some of your experience, it may be how you started your business, why you do it and particularly why you love it. You can talk about your products and how they work. However here is a golden rule – don’t hard sell, in fact you don’t have to sell at all. For example if you sell computers you would write an article on how you tested a new model. You can describe features and benefits and include some photos of it and leave it at that. In the text simply link the name of the computer to your sales page.  People reading the article know you sell computers and if they like the article they may click that link but you have not told them to or even mentioned how much you sell it for! This kind of information works best. Those who want to buy will look further into it and those who don’t will not have felt any pressure to buy and hence are more likely to keep coming back to your blog.

What do you think about blogging in your business? Please comment below.

Roland Millward

You may copy this post and insert into a blog as long as you copy it exactly maintaining any links and link the credit back to Roland Millward Training Services

Publish Posts Regularly

One of the most important things you can do is to publish new posts regularly to your blog.

WordPress enables you to write posts and set publication dates at a date and time of your choice.

This feature is going to make life much easier for you in maintaining a regular flow of posts to your blog so that when you are too busy to spend time at your computer blogging you have no need to worry about publishing posts.

You will be familiar with the box on the right where you can Save  Draft, Preview or Publish. One of the most useful features of this box though is the Publish immediately Edit line. Note in the next illustration what happens when you click on ‘Edit’.

You will see that now when you click on edit a date selection box opens for you to choose a date that you would like the post to be published on. Select dates that are best for you such as perhaps 6 am in the morning ready for new visitors that day. If you are posting daily it will be best to stick to the same time each day to allow a full 24 hours between each post.

One important thing to remember is to make sure that you have set your WordPress to the correct time zone.

Click on Settings in your WordPress Dashboard and you will see a time zone setting. You will see in the illustration below that I have set mine to London. If you don’t do this you will find that there could be many hours difference from when you expected your post to be published and if for example you used Twitter to advertise a new post then found that it had not yet been published due to the time difference it could prove embarrassing as well as annoying to visitors.

As you write your posts and you are happy that they are ready to be published simply set the date and time that you want them to be published and you can then relax knowing that WordPress will do the work for you. You could also set up something like SocialOomph to announce the publication. Again make sure you use the correct time zone.

Your comments on this article are welcome. Please use the box below.