Our weekly webinar this week was on blogs and we opened up the lines for questions and gave lots of tips. Jeanne Kolenda and I covered six great tips and she has posted the details on three of the tips in her Ezine.
Here are the other three tips:
Tip #1 – Using WordPress Plugins – will add functionality to your blog that would otherwise not be available. One of these is called Tweet MeMe and adds a Tweet button to your blog. This gives your visitors an easy way to share your blog with their friends and followers. You can also add a “Share This” button to each post with the Add This plugin. There are thousands of internet marketing plugsins available for your blog. Some of them such as Google Analytics or Clicky Stats will help you track the traffic to your blog. Others will keep a post that you specify always at the top. Plugins are located in your WordPress admin office and are easy to install.
Tip #2 – Form Joint Venture Partnerships. Are you a printer? Do you know a copywriter or graphic artist that would like to post articles to your blog? Are you a real estate agent? Do you know a home inspector, real estate attorney or pest control company that would like to post articles to your blog? Whatever business you are in, there are people in parallel businesses that could help you keep your blog current and exciting saving you time. Another bonus is you are doubling or tripling your current audience since they will be marketing to your blog to their customers.
Tip #3 – Use Internet Marketing Tools & Widgets. These are the static information that appears on the side navigation bars of your blog. This could be your photo, categories of your posts, links to your website or the sites of your JV Partners. There are standard widgets you can add and they are located under Appearance in the admin area. For other items such as opt-in boxes or photos, you will use a text box and copy the html code into the box. (Hint: for your photo, create a post, use the media box to add your photo. The select HTML view instead of visual and copy/paste the code into the text box.)
A blog is a great way to brand your business and as you can see, there are several choices for making your blog interesting and unique to you.