Alberta Business Marketing

Probably not…but I think I took a good step forward on Saturday.

I have been a huge supporter of the blogging platform WordPress for many years.  Like many of you, I cut my teeth on the free versions of WordPress and Blogger.  However, when I started to take blogging seriously, I stumbled on a company called Siteground.com and the rest is history.  Blogging is now part of my daily routine and this blog reaches thousands of folks each day.

WordPress offers one of the most reliable and easy to use blogging platforms available today.  Over the course of my regular business day, I work with many Calgary and global companies on how they can leverage blogs in their business.  Ulistic offers a wide range of blogging consulting services for business.  From blog consulting to coaching.  Contact me if I can help you with your business blogs at anytime.

WordPress is evolving to a fully functional web development platform.

For many years WordPress has strictly been used as a blogging platform.  For a while, some of the leading web developers started developing great looking websites on WordPress.  However over the past little while WordPress has become more acceptable in the mainstream web development world.   WordPress is now making serious moves towards offering a full-featured and rich content management system and web development platform.

On Friday, I met up with a good friend of mine and fellow WordPress blogger in Calgary and we immediately jumped into sharing tips and tricks on how we can make our WordPress blogs really sing.  I shared a few great plugins that I have found and started to use every day.  Many of our Ulistic clients are also leveraging these great additional functions on their WordPress blog.  Some of the plugins allow you to scroll testimonials, perform grammar/spelling checking and a wealth of other great added features.  You can even send a thank you note to those folks who leave a comment on your blog.

Then my friend shared with me a service he has been using and having some great success with, headwaythemes.com.  Headway is a blog development platform for WordPress.  You can see it on this blog, this weekend I changed the layout of my blog to a headway designed blog.  It took a bit of playing around at first, but after you learn how it really works and read the manual  or watch the YouTube videos it is quite awesome.  Headway takes all the confusion of CSS and HTML  and offers a powerful interface for you to develop your own professional business blog.  Upload your own header, change colours and really take ownership of your blog.

Don’t kiss your web developer goodbye just yet, but here is another web tool you can take advantage of for your blogs.  Your web developer combined with Headway can really make your blog rock n’roll.  I am not a developer, but as an avid blogger and marketing professional…I get this and the power a great locking blog can do for business.

Headway only works on your hosted WordPress blog.

Sorry folks…you need to have your own hosted version of WordPress to make this work.  If you have your blog hosted on the free WordPress servers, you can’t take advantage of the power headway offers.  However, don’t worry I have a solution for you.  Get a hosted version of WordPress with your own domain name for only $9.95 for the first year.  Click Here – Cheap WordPress Hosting.  After the first year, your hosting is only $120 for the year.  Great deal to get started.

Headway is about $90 for a personal version which allows you to run it on 2 of your websites, upgrade to the developers version for about $160.00 and use it on unlimited sites.  This is an awesome tool for WordPress, if you are serious about your blogging – this service if for you.

Tags: Akismet, awesome tool, blog, Blog hosting services, Blog software, Blogger, BuddyPress, Business/Finance, Calgary, Computing, content management system, Content management systems, functional web development platform, HTML, mainstream web development world, PHP programming language, Siteground, Technology/Internet, ulistic, USD, web developer, web developer goodbye, web developers, web development platform, web tool, wordpress, World Wide Web, YouTube Inc
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Last weekend I made an impulsive decision to hop in my car and head to Manhattan and join the travel blogging event of the year in Greenwich Village. TBEX ’10. Although I spent almost as much time in my car traveling to and from NYC as I spent in the Big Apple, it was well worth the journey.
The Travel Blog Exchange has taken very little time to find it’s feet and its focus, bringing together travel bloggers from around the world to learn from one another and inspire one another. I first encountered many of the travel blogging community on Twitter. They were there on their little Ning site dreamed up by TBEX founder Kim Mance (@kimmance) to assist bloggers in getting to know one another before the first TBEX event, a one day get-to-know-everyone affair that was an add-on to the already popular BlogHer conference (creating opportunities for women who blog to gain exposure, education, community and economic empowerment) happening early summer 2009 in Chicago.

Being keenly interested in the direction technology as been taking tourism, I headed to South By Southwest in Austin Texas, 2009 where I first crossed paths with the vanguard of the travel writing community – those edgy folks even had their own travel blogging session at SXSW and the room was full to overflowing!! Congrats to that to Pam (@nerdseyeview) and Sheila (@SheilaS) for opening the door to the first real community event for travel bloggers.

After Chicago and the first TBEX gathering, NYC and TBEX ’10 came along.

Wow.

Hundreds of travel bloggers converged on NYC – learning how to craft stories, how to use multimedia, how to earn money by telling travel stories on the Web in two days of learning and networking events. Although the conference took place over two days, the social events and gatherings that were bookended on this event kept the party going for more than a week. Don’t believe me? Check out the #TBEX hashtag on Twitter to see who was there. You’ll see they are already getting ready for TBEX ’11 in Vancouver.  Early Registration has opened and the early registration blogger spots are almost filled already.

The only thing missing? The Travel Industry.
Tourism Folks, these are people you NEED TO KNOW! Travel bloggers are the cool hipsters who have been using the Web to tell travel stories since before you even knew what a blog was.  I know, some of us still don’t get it but that’s OK. Because since these folks get it, we don’t have to understand everything about the Web, we just have to get connected to more travel bloggers.

Top 10 Reasons I hope to see you in YVR

1. Travel Bloggers have a wide range of niche travel interests and they have an audience (your ideal guests) that shares their interests.
2. Travel Bloggers Get it!  The whole it.  They have access to places to distribute their stories about YOU and your community – cool places to go and things to do!
3. Travel Bloggers can help you learn what you need to know.  Over the past year a few of these travel bloggers have creating new business cards – cards because they  are sharing their expertise with the tourism and travel industry in online training.
4. If you like the social part of conferences, you’ll love TBEX.  Sponsored after conference gatherings are good opportunities to network with travel bloggers.  If you (like me) prefer out of the way gathering places, you’ll be sure that TBEX in Vancouver will help you connect with all the neato places to go and things to do so you can enjoy out of the limelight quality time with interesting folks you meet.
5. TBEX is sponsored by the tourism industry in Canada.
   http://tourismvancouver.com/
   http://www.canada.travel/media
   http://www5.hellobc.com/travelmedia/
6. Learn how to pitch stories and meet the people looking for interesting, out of the way places like yours.
7. Since not many in the tourism industry know about TBEX, you’ll get almost exclusive access to travel writers and bloggers.
8. TBEX is the least expensive travel conference on the planet, especially for bloggers, but for tourism industry it’s a great deal too!
9. Did I mention that TripAdvisor gave away three iPads at TBEX10.  I enjoyed the time to chat with my good friends at TripAdvisor and share my concerns about the new paid business listings for accommodation providers.  I’d have had a tough time getting my say at a traditional tourism gathering.
10. Get re-inspired about the latest trends in the uses of technology and social media on the Web in a language you actually understand.

Learn more about Travel Bloggers and their value to the Tourism Industry with these podcast episodes:

• A conversation with bloggers about their networks
• Podcast – a conversation with Travel Bloggers

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According to a recent Nielson report, three quarters of Internet users are social, so surely by now you’ve dipped your toes in the blogging and Facebook pool.

Way back in the old days, 2006 or so, you might have been forgiven by your guests and prospects for not having a life outside your own Website. Conversely, today it is more than likely the first interaction your prospect has with you will be via photo or video sharing by friends and family, reviews of your services on sites like TripAdvisor or Yelp!, or a story by a travel blogger.

So this week, it might be worth considering how deep to dive into the social networking pool?

Since the average Internet user devotes 22% of their Internet time to social networking, how much of your online marketing budget time and money should  be focused around social networking?

Links:

• http://mashable.com/2010/06/15/time-spent-online-nielse/
• Nielson Report on Internet Use
• photo credit Seattle Municipal Archives

Tags: Facebook, free web marketing stuff
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Professional writers blog: that is my short and emphatic answer to the implied question in a guest post by Larry Brooks on the Problogger blog.  His cryptic title, as he described it was, Why Professional Writers Need a Blog. Or Not.  His article raised some interesting questions and on some of these I profoundly disagree with what he said.

What Is A Professional Writer?

To avoid any unnecessary debate over terms, we should clarify what we mean by a professional writer.  In my book it is someone who writes for an audience and enjoys a success in so doing.  Success can be measured in monetary terms or perhaps merely in the number of readers that the writer draws to his writings.  Some successful professional writers are so well known that anything they write will attract a large audience.  For them is the luxury of doing what ever comes naturally and the audience will be there.

Should Professional Writers Blog?

Leaving aside the highly visible and well-known writers, what is the answer to our question for the average professional writer who may be unknown to his first time readers.  Larry Brooks divided such writers into two groups and felt different rules applied.  His groups were

• Non-Fiction Professional Writers
• Fiction Writers

If we examine what a blog really does, I think you will see that really the same answer applies to both. 

Blogs Versus Websites

A blog is really one type of website so in fact the comparison here is between blogs and websites which are not blogs.  Non-blog websites contain static web pages and normally little new content is added from one period to another.

A blog on the other hand has continuing new content added on a time sequence basis.  Very often it has an associated news feed, which is a file that automatically alerts aggregators of news that a new item has been added.  This double-up visibility is one of the key reasons why blogs are much more effective in bringing in visitors to the online property.

Blogs Have Heightened Online Visibility

An even bigger leveraging factor on blog visibility is that Google, the dominant search engine, in some ways overvalues blog post web pages relative to static web pages.  Google does not make public why its behavior should be like this, but one element in this is that the Google search engine values recent new web pages above more established and older web pages, at least for a few days.

This means that if someone wishes to have an online presence, a blog is far superior to a regular non-blog website.

Who Should Blog?

Given this heightened visibility for blogs, who then should be blogging?  A better way of opening up this topic is to ask, Who should not be blogging?  If you are aiming to communicate with the world via an online presence, then this online presence should be a blog.  It may be appropriate to add other more static website components such as a forum or a wiki, but their content will be slightly less visible through the search engines.

Some will question whether they have sufficient ongoing content to be able to create new blog posts with some regularity.  The answer to that is perhaps best illustrated by discussing the group that Larry Brooks suggested should have a static website.

Should Fiction Writers Blog?

Larry Brooks had the following advice for fiction writers:

Why doesn’t a blog work to promote a novel?

Because you can only blog about your book for so long.  And blog readers are almost completely intolerant of self-serving, thinly disguised promotional agendas.

You have to earn every single moment of personal mindshare from a prospective buyer through the delivery of content they can put to work in their lives.

Blogging also comes with another type of risk.

Even if you have valid to offer.

Blogging can be addictive and hungry, it can eat up energy, time and mindspace like no other intellectual pursuit you’ve ever been tempted to give in to.

If you dive in, you need to be all in.   And that’s a huge commitment.

Given that line of thinking, Larry Brooks pushed for a static website for each novel.  However he ignores the fact that blogs are several times more visible than static websites in search engine results.  The blog can be very effective during the buildup to the book launch and following the launch. 

Indeed even thereafter, devout readers may be interested in whatever further developments have occurred about the novel and any sequels. Such content may be less hot with human readers but it serves to maintain visibility among those search engines.  The importance of this is such that a blog is always worth the effort even though these blogs will require only limited extra content as time passes.  Nevertheless they create a much larger impression on the search engine radar screen around the static website that is specifically for the novel.  In this way, the visitor traffic to the novel website will be maximized on an ongoing basis.  That should lead to higher book sales, which is after all the key objective.

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Professional Writers Blog

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Tags: blog, Larry Brooks, novel, website, writer
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Marketing First

That was the title I selected as the introduction for a post to launch the new free downloadable e-book: Marketing Right Now. I pondered long and hard on what title might be best. The book deals with the fundamental basics of starting up and growing a business. Almost by default I chose the title Marketing First. My implicit thinking was that any activity is best done if you first cover strategy and then work out the tactics. That is true in waging war and it is also true in growing your business.

An alternative title might have been Marketing Strategy First. When researching that title, I was struck by a website I found that dealt with ’strategic marketing for growing companies’. The strategic marketing expert had assembled a lot of the right stuff. However I was somewhat surprised to find that the blog was buried almost in the footer and the archive of blog posts, shown on the right, suggested this was not a high priority.

Strategy First, Blog Second

Although there are many important principles in the E-Book, Marketing Right Now, if I could choose only one that would have the biggest impact then I think it would be the title of this post: Blogging First And Foremost.

The sad fact is that blogging does not get the respect it should have. Blogging is all about the dialogue you should have with your prospects and clients. Even if that were not sufficient reason, the other important factor is that Google loves blogs. The RSS news feed for your blog is an instant alert to the world that you have something to say.

Nevertheless blogs, like Rodney Dangerfield, get no respect. Of course they most often started off as personal musings or journals, so why would anyone else care. In addition, blog is such an unfortunate and ungainly name. I often recommend that clients use a different name. For example News and Views is an upbeat kind of title. For some websites, Fresh Ideas can be an even better choice.

Dialogue With Your Market-Place

If you are not using your blog to make contact with your market-place at least once per week, you might adopt this discipline. As your week draws to a close, ask yourself the question, “What did my prospects and clients hear from me this week? Of course there is another question you should be keeping in mind. What did my prospects and clients hear from my competitors? With that thought in mind make sure that early each week you have something to say to these important individuals in your marketplace.

If you have nothing to say, are you sure you’re working hard enough to grow your business. At the very least, you may have seen something in the market-place from your radar screens (Google Alerts, RSS News Feed subscriptions) that your contacts will find interesting. Remember every time you write a blog post, you are improving your visibility with Google. That’s where prospects are looking for a supplier just like you.

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Blogging First And Foremost

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Tags: Business, Rodney Dangerfield
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