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Posts Tagged ‘owner’

Blogging is more than a fast and easy way to add content to your website. A blog is a powerful tool that you can use to develop new and deeper relationships with your website visitors. It can help you build your online presence to attract clients and business partners. Building a relationship with your blog is important as well as building a relationship with your blog visitors.

Be Personable
Blogging doesn’t have to be formal, just share your thoughts. You can post full-length articles (500+ words) that you’ve written but you can also post shorter ones (300 or less words). If you want your readers to feel like they are getting to know you, let them catch glimpses of your life behind the scenes. You don’t have to provide private information to do this so don’t worry about divulging too much.

Admit Your Mistakes
If you want your readers to think of you as an expert you may feel like you have to present yourself as someone who never makes a mistake, a perfect person. The truth is that someone who seems perfect can be so intimidating that they make themselves unapproachable.

You don’t have to tell your readers about every little thing you have done wrong but sharing an occasional blunder from your history helps to make you seem more real, make you more personable. When your visitors see that you’re human and found success anyways, they start to believe that you can help them do it to.

Share Your Dreams
We all have goals, don’t we? Make your blog readers your accountability partners and share both long and short term goals with them. At the start of a new month, let them know what projects you want to accomplish and how you’re going to tackle them. Promise to come back at the end of the month with an update. Invite interaction by asking them for encouragement and advice.

Remember that if you have a business blog that, you should be careful and not to get overly personal. But if you want to make a personal section on your blog, I would suggest that you make it know that it’s your personal ramblings. This may be the way you should go if you find that you really enjoy blogging for personal reasons, so go ahead and start a separate section on your blog and bring the focus back to your business blog on the rest of the website.

If you’re willing to let your website visitors see you as a real person, you’ll find that it will go a long ways towards building relationships with them. People are more likely to spend money with and follow the advice of someone they know, like and respect.

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A Powerful Marketing Combination

Do you blog?  Do you write articles?  If you answered yes to either question, read on to find out about a powerful marketing combination to boost your business.

The missing key for many is Twitter.  Do you know that you can have your articles at EzineArticles go directly to Twitter?  AND you can have your WordPress blog posts go directly to Twitter?  What does this mean to you?  More exposure for you.  If you have the Twitter widget on your blog, you have a full circle viral marketing system in place because your articles will then come back to your blog.

The strategy for articles and blog posts automatically showing up on Twitter is to go to Twitter and tweet about them after they appear automatically.  Talk about them, explain them, do whatever you can do in the 140 characters you have for a Twitter micro-blog post.

How do you accomplish this automatic Twitter posting?  It’s really quite easy.

• Go to your profile manager in EzineArticles and put your Twitter username and password in the space provided.  Your newly approved articles will now go to Twitter as micro blog posts.
• Get the TwitterTools plugin for WordPress and install it.  The only option you want turned off is to create a blog post from a tweet.  Do have your blog posts sent to Twitter and do use the Twitter sidebar widget.
• Write lots of articles and blog posts, go tweet about them and watch your presence grow.

There is no faster way to become the authority in your area of expertise than to combine this powerful threesome to drive traffic to your blog and articles.

Wouldn’t you like to learn more about implementing this powerful strategy in your online business?

What are your thoughts on the subject? Please comment below.

Twitter is a micro-blogging platform. It lets you post up to 140 characters at a time. Some people post their status every 5 minutes (“Waiting for the bus”, “On the bus”, “Walking home”) and companies use Twitter to get the word out about new products, blog posts, and other random stuff.

Companies from all over the world have Twitter accounts and thousands of people following them. Some of these companies are Apple, Intel, H&R Block, and Zappos. Barack Obama has over 38k followers!

To leverage the Twitter potential you need to have people following you. That is, people that want to be updated on what you are up to.

Step 1: Importing Contacts

When you sign up for Twitter you will have a chance to import contacts from Gmail, Hotmail, and your own address book. Do it.

Step 2: Complete Your Profile

Make sure all your profile is complete and include a link to your website. Add “http” at the beginning of it to make it clickable. Personalize the colors and the sidebar on your profile page. Use keywords in your profile so others can find you.

Step 3: Understand the Dynamics of Twitter

Twitter is not a marketing tool; it’s a social tool. That means:

• Don’t spam
• Follow other users
• Be active in the community (comment and post frequently)
• Post useful information
• Don’t post every 10 minutes
• Engage in conversations. Retweet (reply to other tweets) often
• Don’t promote yourself. Share cool stuff. To give your company exposure, do it the smart way. Direct your followers to a blog post with useful information and have that post invite users to take action. Don’t try to take people from Twitter to your checkout page directly.

Step 4: Build Your Audience

There are several things that you can do to build your audience:

• Put a link to “Follow Me on Twitter” in your email signature, forums signature, website, and maybe even your business cards
• Invite people to follow you on Twitter at the end of each blog post you create
• Find Twitter users that you really look up to and see who is following them. Follow these people. Once they see you are following them, they will follow you.
• See who is following your friends and follow them. They will follow you too.
• Use Twitter directories to find members who are likely to follow you. My favorites are Just Tweet It and Twellow.
• Use the search feature to find profiles that you want to follow. You can use Twitter’s RSS feed to be notified every time a tweet is made containing a certain keyword.

Step 5: Watch Your Following/Followers Ratio

Try to have a balance between people you follow and people that follow you. If 1,000 people follow you and you only follow 10 folks, you will be seen as selfish and snob. If 10 people follow you and you follow 1,000, you will be seen as a spammer.

Some tips that will help you keep both numbers balanced:

• Grow slow. Instead of adding 500 new friends in one day, add maybe 50 and wait for them to follow you. Then do another 50.
• Use a tool like Friend or Follow to see who is following you that you are not following and who you are following that is not following you. This tool is very useful to balance the number of following/followers.
• Avoid the “follow/no follow” tactic. Some people follow others so they follow them and then they stop following those folks. Avoid this practice if you don’t want to look like a spammer.

Step 6: Post Useful Tweets

Make it worthwhile to follow you. If you’ve found something that your audience might find useful, tweet it. You can use Twitter tools to automatically tweet your blog posts.

Share what you do but avoid “selling”. For example, if you are a web developer you can tweet “we just finished designing the website for ABC Widgets” but avoid something like “Custom Web Design from $899″. 

Step 7: Learn from the Experts

Find 10-20 users with over 300 followers and see what they are doing right. Get ideas and implement them.

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