Blog Coach - Blogging Consultant » Business Blog Design

Business Blog Design: Navigation & using your Content

The Blog Coach — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 22:36:20 +0000

Making it easy for readers to get around your blog is essential – it’s also very sensible. You put a lot of time and effort into writing your posts, so you want to make sure that they can be found easily and any associated information also highlighted to your blog readers.

If you have special elements – these could be promotions, services, products, giveaways etc. – that you are looking to highlight, then these should be positioned accordingly at the top of your blog, above the fold. This will make these elements easy to locate and additional variations to the blog, as they will no doubt vary over time as your business priorities change.

However, the rest of your content also needs to be shown off to best effect! The main methods will be via the individual categories and the archives and, from personal experience, the categories which will be most frequently used, so make sure that they are prominently positioned.

There are some other ways and means that you can include to help encourage people to explore your blog further and therefore allow you to gain maximum benefit from the time that you invested in your posts. Some that you might like to consider are:

Link to other posts on your blog which contain information related to the post that they are currently reading – they are clearly interested in the topic, so help them find more details about it. In Wordpress, you can do this with a plug-in called Related Posts.

Links in your posts

Within your posts, reference other posts on your blog so that you make it easy for people to find them. Just as you should reference other people’s blogs in your posts as sources of additional information, there’s no harm in referencing your own as well.

Key posts

You probably have set of key posts (which I call Foundation posts) and which contain information that is key to your services and your business in general – so highlight them, perhaps by creating a list under the heading of “Key information”. If you can’t specifically identify ones, then check your stats package for the posts that attract the most hits or appear most prominently in the Search Engines and then highlight them.

Most Popular posts

Check which posts attract most comments or which have the most visitors (again a plug-in can help Wordpress users here) and make sure that they are highlighted so that more people can read and share them. The sidebar is a good place to create this list although you could alternatively make a special page.

Show Categories in the Post headers

Include the names of the categories that the post appears in alongside the title or at the bottom of the post. It will help people to find other posts which are related and that you have categorised in the same way.

By using these methods, you are giving additional value to your readers by helping them find further information that is relevant to them – at the same time, you are of course promoting more of your own content and so helping the marketing of your blog. As an added bonus, you are also extending the internal linking within your blog which the Search Engines will be pleased to use and give you an extra “plus point” for.

Business Blog Design: Profile and Contact Details

The Blog Coach — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 10:00:27 +0000

While I’ve written on this subject before, I feel that it is worthy of inclusion again as part of the Business Blog Design series.

It’s all about communication!

When we talk to someone face to face, either at a personal or business level, there will be a point when the conversation turns to questions such as “what do you do?”, “where are you from?” or something akin to “what team do you support?”. Why? Because we are interested in knowing more about the people that we deal with – it’s in our nature.

In the same way, blogs are really all about communication too, as well as interaction and conversation. Personal blogs approach this with certain goals in mind – getting in touch with people with common interests or just wanting “to be heard” for example – while companies using business blogs have a different agenda and may be looking to generate trust, differentiate themselves and ultimately develop additional business.

In both cases, you need to make sure that people can find out more about you … and also find you! When you are reading a business blog and find what is being said interesting, it can be very frustrating if you want to contact the person or find out where they are based only to discover that that little (but crucial) bit of information is nowhere to be seen. Not only is this frustrating but it can also be damaging from a business point of view too!

Make your details easy to find

So make sure that you provide your readers with a clear way of finding out about the person who is writing the blog and who they are communicating with. They’ll already have a good idea but what you write and how you write it but help them on their way – always remember to put up a profile up on your Business Blog as well as a way for your readers to get in touch with you, though of course those can be on the same page.

If you prefer to include your details as part of your sidebar then keep it short and sweet – that’s part of your “prime real estate” that we talked about in the original post so you’ll have lots of business specific stuff that you also want to be highly visible there. I personally prefer a link through to a separate page where you have a little more space to include whatever details seem appropriate to you. And a photo … always remember a photo! Most of us work visually, so that help your readers picture you, even if you’re not totally comfortable with it like me.

What to include?

Some profiles will focus on past work and experience ( no CVS though, please), others will have more of a current focus and outline future plans. What ever you put there, try to make it personal though and don’t forget that picture as well! Remember that from a networking perspective, your Business Blog acts as the hub at the centre of that network – people are therefore going to be interested in the “real you” and what makes you tick so give them some insights into the person behind the Blog.

Don’t forget your legal obligations

Finally, in Europe at least, a new law which came into force at the beginning of 2007 requires that emails and websites (and hence blogs) to display certain details about the company and/or individual that is writing them so make sure that you comply if necessary. There’s more information about this here.

Make sure that your profile and your contact details are clearly visible on your Blog – make it easy for others to find out more about you and contact you!

The Blog Coach and the Irish Blog Awards

The Blog Coach — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 21:49:48 +0000

Well, I am very pleased to say that two of the blogs which have made the short list for Best Business Blog in the Irish Blog Awards 2007 come from organisations which The Blog Coach has been working with over recent months.

Two very different sites as well and it’s nice to see that they have been so well received after all the hard work put in by Krishna De and Ann Greene who write and run them.

Biz Growth News – Krishna De

A traditional blog in terms of format, though one that is absolutely full of information for a business looking for ideas and new information about anything and everything to do with developing business and building a brand online and offline. Podcasts, webinars and offline seminars as well as the blog itself and yet that is still only scratching the surface of what Krishna offers.

In March, we’ll be looking in a little more detail at the thought processes that went on in terms of the modifications and the implementation of the final result that you see now. However, as you read the posts, you will see that all that this does is complement the great content that Krishna provides. A blog which just cries out to be in your RSS reader!

Allagi Consulting – Ann Greene

This is a full Blogsite (that’s to say a complete website including a blog which is all built using Blog software) which has given Ann Greene, who runs Allagi Consulting, total control over the whole of the site in terms of being able to add and change content as she requires, as well as the ability to add pages and so grow the site when she needs to – with little to no intervention from anyone, including me.

The site also incorporates the Allagi Blog which Ann uses to great effect to look at her specialist area of expertise of team building and team development. Although it’s still in its infancy, the blog was already considered worthy of a place in the shortlist and you can’t say fairer that that!

Do check out both blogs and I wish them both the best of luck in the final which will be announced at the Awards Dinner on March 3rd. In the meantime, so as you don’t miss any, I will be listing the nominees in the main categories in a special version of Spotlight on UK Blogs (in this case Spotlight on Irish Award Blogs) this Friday.

How to stop comment spam on your Blog

The Blog Coach — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 21:55:33 +0000

It seems that no matter what new online communication tools we come up with, there are going to be those who want to abuse them. We are all aware of the way in which Email has revolutionised how we communicate (and the genuine commercial opportunities it offers) but also the way in which it has been blighted over recent years by email spam.

Likewise, blogs are open to abuse from individuals looking to exploit them at the expense of others, the preferred ways being Spam Blogs and Comment Spam. So let’s see why Comment Spam exists and how we can go about stopping it on our blogs.

What is Comment Spam?

Comment Spam is where a spammer leaves comments on blog posts that have nothing to do with the post itself but merely contain multiple links back to the spammer’s commercial website. Most Comment Spam is now carried out automatically rather than by individuals and its goal is generally just to create links back to a target site (and so improve its Search Engine ranking), though it may also attract a small amount of traffic as well.

If my Comment Spam filter is at all representative, then the subject matter will be familiar to all of us using email, since the same types of subjects and messages tend to crop up in both.

How do we stop Comment Spam on our own blog?

So what are our options when it comes to avoiding having comment spam swamping our blogs, other than turning off comments all together of course – and that’s something I’m certainly not advocating!

Comment Moderation
The most time consuming way is simply to moderate out all of the spam comments – that is to say, you look at each comment which has been left and allow genuine ones to appear on your blog while deleting the spam comments. This can become very time consuming (not to mention frustrating!) because once you are “found” by the spam commenters, you are going to be receiving a lot of these. Rule of thumb – the more successful you are, the easier you are to find and the more you will receive – I imagine with such a high profile blog, Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger suffers more than most, as he comments here.

CAPTCHA methods
CAPTCHA is actually an acronym (ok, since you asked – Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart – there, now wasn’t that interesting!) but you’ll know it as a distorted series of letters and numbers which appear on the page and that you have to type in. This is designed to prove that you are a human and not an automated visitor – or, in this case, spammer. Typed in correctly, it allows you to submit your comment, but will stop most forms of automated comment spam getting through.

Specialist Software Intervention
Just like with email, there are also providers of specialist software which can help us and here, in my opinion, the leader in this respect is called Akismet. Here, the software identifies the comments that it believes are spam and impounds them – it’s also provided free of charge, except for commercial use, which is an additional bonus. Although it was developed by the company involved with Wordpress, it has been modified to work with many other types of blog software so it’s worth checking out. Another plug-in for Wordpress is Spam Karma which also comes highly recommended.

Getting commenters to log-in
You can of course elect to only accept comments from people that have already logged in to a registration system which you run on your blog – this way you can be fairly sure that they will be leaving real comments because you have effectively “pre-vetted” them.

Which method is the best?

All of the methods above work well from a functional level and will help to avoid the vast majority of comment spam from arriving in your posts. Therefore, when deciding which method to use, I was personally swayed by the impact that it would have on readers wanting to leave genuine comments. Basically, I wanted to make sure that it was as easy as possible for them to do so.

Therefore, I elected to go down the specialist software route which has no impact on readers leaving comments and nothing additional for them to do – I therefore use Akismet on my blogs and those that I set-up for the businesses and individuals I work with. The results? Well, so far so good. It stops 95% of spam and also learns from all the blogs using it, so keeps up with (if not stays ahead of) the comment spammers and their methods. Overall, a big thumbs up from me.

BTW – to make sure that you have all the information at your finger tips to make your own decision, no matter which blog platform you use, I’ll be doing a second post on the subject of comment spam next week where I will try to lay out the different options available for each platform. In the meantime, any thoughts you’d like to share on what has worked for you, then please leave a comment – a real one preferably!

Use Graphics: make people want to read your Blog

The Blog Coach — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 21:54:41 +0000

There is a lot of talk about what you write on your blog being all important (and it is!) – as you can imagine, this is going to be an area that we will be coming back to on a regular basis here at The Blog Coach.

However, it’s also important to make sure that the look and feel of the overall blog (including the individual posts) both support and promote the information that it provides. In fact, through careful use of graphics, we can influence the way in which people react to our blog and make it as easy as possible for them to take on board what we are writing about.

Make your Blog stand out from the crowd

The way your blog is presented also plays a key role in differentiating not only your blog, but also you and your business. After all, that‘s what we are looking to achieve in business, being noticed – so, any way which helps us to stand out from our competitors has to be positive.

I don’t know about you, but when I see blogs which, for example, run Wordpress but just use the basic template – you know the one with the blue box at the top – my first reaction is that there can’t be anything of value there. In fact, I probably write it off as a “splog” (spam blog).

Irrational and quite possibly untrue. Nevertheless I just think that someone who cannot be bothered to spend a bit of effort (or a few pounds) to “spruce up” their blog probably hasn’t spent much time on the content either. Others have told me that I’m not alone in this respect. So spend a little time on the design of your blog and your posts, and help the information that you are carefully putting together get read.

Caveat: try not to get too carried away. Remember that any graphics you include should not be there to distract your readers but rather to help them focus on the information and ideally encourage them to comment.

Some Graphics Sites to try

So where can I find good images to support the information in my blog, I hear you ask! Well, at one end of the spectrum, there are the files that come free with programs such as PowerPoint which offer both clipart and some photos which can be used.

However, these can often be a little bit ‘samey’ or not in keeping with what you want to communicate with your blog. There are, however, a number of excellent sites where you can find quality images covering a whole range of topics. Most of the good stock photos sites charge a small fee now, but the images are well worth it if you choose carefully.

Some sites worth a look are:

A word of caution: as with all images that you use off the net, do make sure that you follow any copyright requirements – the last think you want is to have issues with companies claiming ownership of images which you have used legitimately.

Finding a Domain name for your Blog

The Blog Coach — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 07:43:25 +0000

If you have decided to set up a Business Blog which will be separate to your main company website, then part of your planning process will be to select and buy a domain name for it.

In some cases, this is a very simple process but if you are in any way unsure, then there are a number of different elements that you should consider. Having a suitable domain name is important when it comes to branding and developing both reputation and credibility, whether it is dealing with a company, sector, service, product or individual niche.

So, what elements should you bear in mind when picking a domain name?

Subject matter of the blog: to have a descriptive domain name for your blog will make it all the more memorable for those people reading it and also more memorable when they want to recommend it!
Branding elements for your business: you may wish to have a branding element incorporated into it as a special attribute of some sort.
SEO elements: from a Search Engine Optimisation point of view, the domain name is an important element and so will ideally contain the primary keyword or keywords for the blog
Supporting the title of your blog: where possible either make it the same or incorporate the title of your blog in the domain name which will help recognition;
Availability: it may sound obvious but do check that the domain name is available early in the process. There is no point agonising for days over the perfect domain name only to find that it isn’t available anyway!
Length of domain name: while it is good to have a descriptive name, you should avoid one which is too long and also ideally avoid one with words separated with lots of hyphens which now has “spammy” overtones – something you want to avoid for your business
Top Level Domain: whether it should be a .com, .co.uk, .net etc. As with a normal website, it may well be sensible to cover all bases and take the main ones that are available and so safeguard it from a branding perspective

You may or may not be able to get a suitable mix of these elements and generally you will need to find a compromise which combines the points which are most important to you. Try to base these on the aims of your blog and your target audience which are two of the key elements you should be looking at during the planning process before setting up a business blog.

Feedburner: making RSS work for you

The Blog Coach — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 10:40:20 +0000

In my post about Technorati last week called Using Technorati to research your future Blog or your Market, I mentioned that there were two main blog site recommendations for anyone intending to use blogs. The second of these is Feedburner which provides some excellent easy to use tools that all bloggers can benefit from, right from the start.

Using your RSS feed is particularly important as the role and the profile of RSS is going to grow enormously over the coming few months particularly when Microsoft releases the version 7 of its Internet Explorer which will include an RSS reader and so will make it quick and simple for anyone to save and use RSS feeds to keep up to date with news and information.

Feedburner offers a number of paid services which you can progress on to as the need arises, but their free services are well worth taking the time to examine and incorporate in your Blog. There are ones which I particularly recommend because I feel that they help in utilising and developing your Blog’s RSS Feed in important ways.

The elements I would highlight are:

Subscriber information: by channeling your RSS Feed subscriptions through Feedburner, you can obtain additional information about those subscribing. Specifically, it allows you to identify the number of people that are actively subscribed to your feed, as well as providing information on the type of reader they are using and the articles that have been visited directly from the feed itself.

User friendly RSS feed: through Feedburner, you can make certain changes to the look and feel of your RSS feed which will help personalise them and use them more fully to market your business. These include giving you the opportunity to add your logo, which in itself reinforces the branding aspect, and changing the description of the feed. To do this directly to the feed yourself requires additional technical knowledge, but Feedburner makes it simple for everyone as is well worth doing.

Feed Reader Chicklets: the chicklets are the little RSS logos with “Newsgator”, “Bloglines”, “My Yahoo” etc which appear on many blogs. Feedburner provides the code and images required to create these quickly and, while not necessary to allow people to use your feed, any method such as this which increases the visibility of your feed on your Blog can only be beneficial to your promotional activities.

RSS Feed via email: for those people who don’t use RSS readers but still want to know when you have updated your blog, there is the option of an email subscription service. Feedburner provides you with the code to create a basic sign up form on your blog and then visitors can use to subscribe to receiving your blog updates automatically via email. A similar service is provided by Feedblitz.

Headline Animator: this is a small image using an animated gif file, which automatically displays the titles of the last 5 posts from your Blog and allows people to click through a sign up for the feed. It appears in the form of a box (2 formats available) which can be used either in emails or perhaps in online forums etc.

PingShot: this is an ideal companion to the concept of “Post and Ping”, where PingShot notifies a number of servers at once that you have published new content on your Blog . No real difference from the other services available at Pingomatic and Pingoat (indeed it works through Pingomatic) but a good extra service.

How do you do this? Well, just head along to the Feedburner site, sign up for an account and then “burn” a Feed using your current feed, follow the instructions and away you go! There are some useful services there and with RSS destined to become more widespread as the year progresses, set up in the best way you can in readiness.

Your Profile and contact details

The Blog Coach — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 12:10:40 +0000

Business Blogs as well as personal blogs, have a personal side to them which, in part, differentiates them from being just another website full of product information and advertising speak. That’s a key part of why they work so well in communicating ideas and opinions, and in gaining positive reactions.

So make sure that you provide your readers with a clear way of finding out about the person who is writing the blog and who they are going to be communicating with. Always remember to put up a profile up on your Business Blog and also a way for your readers to get in touch with you.

If you prefer to include your details as part of your sidebar then keep it short and sweet – there’s lots more information that you also want to be highly visible there. I personally prefer a link through to a separate page where you have a little more space to include whatever details seem appropriate to you.

Some profiles will focus on past work and experience ( no CVS though, please), others will have more of a current focus and outline future plans. What ever you put there, try to make it personal though and, for extra impact, put up a picture as well. Remember that from a networking perspective, your Business Blog acts as the hub at the centre of that network – people are therefore going to be interested in the “real you” and what makes you tick so give them some insights into the person behind the Blog.

You also want people to be able to contact you. They can do this by posting comments on your blog, but they may also want to get in contact with you directly. So, make sure that you also have your contact details on your blog, either as part of your profile or in a separate section – or both! There’s nothing more frustrating than finding a really interesting blog and wanting to get in touch with the author but not being able to do so.

Key tip: make sure that your profile and your contact details are clearly visible on your Blog and help start that conversation!

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