There are so many ways a blog can help you create awareness about your cause, service offering or product but it’s important to pay attention to the mechanics – the ins and outs of your blog – otherwise you won’t reach your target market and ultimately your time will be wasted. A blog is not a diary; it’s meant to be shared with someone other than yourself!

Yesterday was this blog’s best day ever with the “Ning.com” post. I already had in mind some great blogging tips I liked to follow, but yesterday’s stats reaction sparked a couple more. So here are some blogging tips you can use to increase visitors and rank.

1. Focus on the headline. Just like in a newspaper or magazine, the headline is the most important part of your post. Your headline needs to be a near certain match to the keywords your target audience is searching for. For this one, the keywords in the headline are blogging tips, visitors, and rank.
2. Pay attention to your advertising. Don’t let your advertising get out of control. If you use Google AdSense or LinkShare or something similar, strategically place it so that it’s NOT IN THE WAY; or hire a virtual assistant (hint) to create stealth image links that don’t look like ads. Try to stay away from placing context-sensitive ads in your post itself unless you believe the ROI is worth it.
3. Post early. I’m not talking about the rule of firsts, although that’s important, too. I’m actually talking about posting early in the morning. Seriously! You’ll notice that the earlier you post, the higher your daily traffic to that post will be. Try me out if you don’t believe it. If you’re not an early riser, schedule your post to be published in advance (you can do this with WordPress).
4. Choose tags wisely. You don’t need a huge number of tags. Choose a handful that are right on. And remember to use your tags in your post! If you don’t, they’ll go ignored. It’s like advertising something that isn’t for sale. You MUST use your tags. So, here’s a key: when choosing tags, scan the body of your post for keywords and pull out the ones that appear most often.
5. Include a subscribe option. Some people (like me) would rather be emailed your blog posts than to try and come back every day. Include a subscribe to RSS or Email option as a courtesy to your visitors. You can get one with a free FeedBurner subscription (if you don’t have FeedBurner, you should).

If you have additional, useful blogging tips, please include them here with a link to your blog! And feel free to ping this post and I’ll display your trackback.

–Tia

© 2008 – 2009, Tia Peterson. All rights reserved. This text may be reproduced with permission. Please contact tia@tiadpeterson.com to request permission to reuse this content. Thank you!

Leexan Hong (friends call him Xan) is president of CTE Healthcare Communications (formerly X-Marketing), based in Philadelphia. Xan’s blog, My Life as an Entrepreneur, is located at http://blog.leexanhog.com and is also listed on my Blogroll.

Xan is a self-described “serial entrepreneur” but I need to clarify that he is actually successful. That is key – it’s quite possible to be a serial entrepreneur without actually accomplishing anything (some of us are still in the process of “success” – aren’t we always?) He successfully started his own marketing firm (which was initially out of his home) and eventually grew and transformed that into now what is CTE Healthcare Communications. He’s also successful in real estate among other things. I’ll let you read Xan’s story for yourself.

Welcome to the blog club, Xan! And a thousand congrats on the launch of CTE!!

Cheers,

Tia, All American Admin
Join my Biznik Network!

About CTE Healthcare Communications: CTE develops and facilitates patient, patient advocate and caregiver education workshops. CTE works in partnership with a number of organizations to educate patients and caregivers about various medical conditions in order to achieve treatment goals, and to empower and encourage patients to continue treatment. (Adapted from CTE website. Learn more here.)

© 2008 – 2009, Tia Peterson. All rights reserved. This text may be reproduced with permission. Please contact tia@tiadpeterson.com to request permission to reuse this content. Thank you!

Here’s what I discovered: keeping up with the social media crowd is exhausting! This is a lot to ask of any small business owner. As a means of marketing your business or getting the word out, trying to do the social media thing is just beyond me. I use MySpace and Facebook for FRIENDS, and the nice thing about it is that if I don’t log on for a few days, no biggie. My friends have plenty to do besides just listening to me rant or rave about something new. Adding the blog has been great – I’ve expanded my circle of influence and I’ve also gotten a lot more hits to my business website. But beyond the blog and my other marketing methods, and actually doing work for clients, I was tiring myself out trying to figure out how to make Twitter worth it for me.

I also discovered that Twitter simply takes too much time! Yes, they’ve made it more convenient with a feature that lets you text your little updates to Twitter, rather than logging into the website and updating it there, BUT, convenient though it may be, it is not less time-consuming.

So, being the generalizing woman that I am, I am going to go out on a limb and say that social media works for social media gurus and junkies. They have the perfect audience: other social media gurus and junkies. And it also works for people like Andy Sernovitz (who I love) and Seth Godin (who I also love… “marketing-threesome”, maybe? , who are definitely considered experts in their field and who had a huge following before Twitter was even conceived. Twitter also works for people who enjoy reading the little updates of random people they don’t know, OR, who simply enjoying updating people they don’t know about their own random thoughts. Twitter is also popular with the TED crowd. I had never even heard of TED until I joined Twitter.

There are some things to be thankful for. Here is the list.

Thank you, Twitter, for…

1. Introducing me to TED. Very cool.
2. Making me feel proud that Andy Sernovitz became a follower of mine. That, really, was my only goal.
3. Giving me exposure to another very popular social media tool.
4. Aiding in the realization that social media tools aren’t part of my ideal marketing cuisine.

Cheers, folks! Have a great day! By the way, if you haven’t checked out Twitter, check it out! Seriously, you should try it. You might learn something new like I did!

Tia

(I’m also done with Blogjet…but that’s for another blog)

© 2008 – 2009, Tia Peterson. All rights reserved. This text may be reproduced with permission. Please contact tia@tiadpeterson.com to request permission to reuse this content. Thank you!