Where Do You Promote Your Local Blog?

September 13th, 2011

Sometimes, your small business blog needs a helping hand. After all, you want as many locals as possible to get their eyes on your content. While social media marketing does its part, it’s very time sensitive and the clicks you’ll get are likely to bleed out over time (per post) – that’s why blog content is more useful in the long run.

Local news/blog sites are important for small businesses and their blogs. Patch.com is a great example of a community-specific news site that you can use to directly and indirectly promote your blog. You can participate on relevant news stories by commenting or just browsing to learn more about your customers and what they do and do not like. Each neighborhood Patch has a section where you can promote your events and invite others. Patch sites give local businesses the best of both worlds in terms of online promotion and the opportunity to meet with customers face to face.

Placeblogger.com is another site where you can submit your local blog. Let’s say for example, that you’re a real estate agent looking for a place to submit your local blog. Straight from their FAQs section, it states, “If your blog is simply new listings, there are many sites for you to use to spread the word — but Placeblogger is not one of them.” Simply put, this is a place for community driven news that’s actually helpful and interesting to people, not just search engines.

Check out these other location based sites and let us know what you think of “hyperlocal” sites:

Outside.In
LOCQL
Spot.us
EveryBlock
Fwix

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7 Blog Topic Ideas for Your Small Business

September 6th, 2011

How was everyone’s Labor Day weekend?

Getting back from a looong weekend can be hard, especially when it comes to thinking of new blog topics for your business. If you start to feel tired about blogging about your business, chances are that your readers will feel it too. There are only so many ways to keep content fresh, meaning blog topics and the format that you use. Don’t worry, your business has more to work with than you think!

  1. Use different media – Slideshows, podcasts, videos, and Twitter chat transcriptions can all serve as a great alternative to a “normal” blog post.
  2. Show your audience how a recent event is related to your industry. Discussing current news can help increase the social media shareability of your blog post.
  3. Case studies: Highlight a successful client and show the problems you helped them overcame.
  4. Linking out and name dropping too much is never a good thing. But you can always come up with a small list industry-specific blogs that you keep up with.
  5. Debunk a  widely believed and incorrect myth within your industry
  6. Showcase your staff or have an employee spotlight. You can also go on to explain how your business is different from competitors.
  7. Talk about what you love about your business. While you’re at it, you can also talk about things that you don’t like so much. The key is to tie it into a positive at the end. For example, sure the social media industry is always changing which can be confusing, but on the up side, you’re always learning new things.

Business blogging doesn’t always have to just focus on your products/services. No one likes a straight up sales pitch and blogging is not meant to be that way. Thinking of these other ideas will help bring more readers to your blog and website so that. If those topics don’t do it for you, feel free to brainstorm some more until you’ve found the right one that you can elaborate on.

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Advanced Business Blogging Webinar by Hubspot Review

January 24th, 2009

bill gatesI attended a webinar today on advanced business blogging by Hubspot. Don’t let the advanced part in the title scare you away. Hubspot, an online marketing company similar to emarketed, does a great job on providing webinars. Today’s webinar focused on blogging and can be viewed here. A few notes about the actual webinar that really made this interesting. First they had a powerpoint of the webinar that can be accessed here through SlideShare and a live video feed of the presenter that was being pulled from Mogulus. You can view Hubspot’s channel here. Mogulus provides a free service and a paid version which removes the advertisements. There were no advertisements on the webinar but when I viewed the video on Mogulus there were advertisements. So I’m assuming that Hubspot is using the free version. They have over 800 viewers on the webinar today! You can view all of their shows on their Mogulus channel or here on their site. Hubspot also integrated their Twitter account into the presentation so you could ask questions through Twitter during the webinar. There were also links to Facebook and LinkedIn as well from the webinar page. These are all free tools that any one can use.  The use of these social media tools was very impressive and is definately something that we’re looking to integrate into our next version of our emarketed site. They were able to utlize these free services which can be used by anyone: Twitter, SlideShare, Facebook, & Mogulus

Ok, lets get into some of the key points from the webinar. A lot of the content which I’m proud to say has been discussed by emarketed in past blogs. Hubspot goes into why you should blog with 5 keys to a successful blogging:

1. Pick your target personas
2. Create a mix of posts
3. Write great posts
4. Sustain it
5. Spread it

One of the great take aways from this webinar is that your SEO (search engine optimization) efforts can start from your blog. You should write content that relates to your products and/or services. One thing to remember though is that SEO takes time and this is the same for writing blog posts. You will not see the direct results of your blog writing for several months. You also have to promote your blog once it’s up. It’s the same for your website which our clients are starting to understand. People will not just magically stumble across your blog when you write content. It must be promoted. Some of the methods Hubspot discussed were the following: post to twitter, comment on other blogs, post to facebook, start building a list of subscribers to your blog. They also had a great tip about using images through Flickr so I took their advice for this blog post. We do not always uses images in blog posts but I can see how it makes the blog easier to read with an image.

For more information regarding the webinar you’ll have to watch it at the following link.

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Posted in search engine optimization, social media | 2 Comments »