From the questions I get asked every day, I see that more and more people, both as individuals and as representatives of their companies, are looking for help in making sure that their blogging is working for them. It might be for an individual blog, or for one as part of their main website or for one that’s taking a leading role in their social media campaign. All are out there and being developed on a regular basis.

Of course, there’s a huge amount of information scattered around the internet about blogging including my own blog at Better Business Blogging – so where should people start looking? Well, my goal here is to make sure the answer is at “The Blog Coach”!

I’ve been writing about blogging (and doing it!) for some four years and want to bring all of that knowledge and experience here to you at the Blog Coach whether you’re coming to it for the first time or are looking for help to make it work better for you.

In fact, here atThe Blog Coach, I’ll be providing help and advice in response to a whole raft of questions from people including:

• those already blogging who are looking for new ideas, hints and recommendations to take it to the next level
• people looking for additional ideas on how to promote the blog and improve their Search Engine optimisation
• those looking for ways in which it can work better with the other social media tools and techniques which are available
• organisations wanting to learn how to improve its use for their business and attracting more customers.

In addition to the articles and advice, there are also a series of services which I offer either to create for you a blog which will fulfil the role you want it to and others where you can get the help and consultancy individually at the pace you want to help you develop you own blog and get the most out of it.

But for now, we have the opportunity to ask anything you want and I’ll try to answer it in a blog post over the coming weeks. Just send an email to mark@theblogcoach.co.uk

It’s good to be back sharing information here so do get in touch, ask those questions you’ve been wanting to and share your own experiences here with others! I look forward to chatting wih you!

Related posts:

1. The Blog Coach: new and improved
2. Generating Ideas for your Business Blog posts
3. Generating yet more ideas for your Business Blog

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:

• www.dreamstime.com
• www.istockphoto.com
• www.bigstockphoto.com
• www.123rf.com
• www.canstockphoto.com
• www.sxc.hu
• www.fotolia.co.uk
• www.stockxpert.com

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.

Other ways to break up posts

In addition to the use of images, there are of course many other ways in which you can help to make a blog more readable. Some you might like to consider are:

• break up the posts into manageable chunks
• keep paragraphs shorter than you might do in a written document
• use subheadings so that people can skim to the place and the information they want if required (better than them leaving the blog)
• use bullets where appropriate or indeed create a whole blog comprising of a list – while I’m personally not a great fan of these posts, they do work well

If you mix in some of these and incorporate images which help your blog’s look and feel, then you’ll be taking a big step towards encouraging people to read your blog and take on board the information that the posts contain.

Then of course, it’s just a case of writing something valuable …!

Related posts:

1. Linking to other blogs: business benefits
2. Feedburner: making RSS work for you
3. Business Blog Design: Navigation & using your Content

Anyway, here are some of the ones that I tend to use.

Write about current events

Something that you probably do on an ongoing basis is keeping an eye on what is being written about your industry, perhaps through various news media and ideally with the help of RSS feeds which of course saves you a load of time and gets you the news in double quick time. So just choose an event or piece of information which is of interest to you and your readers and give your comments on it and perhaps its implications. Don’t forget to reference the article and the site where appropriate though.

Read other blogs

Keep an eye on other blogs and what they are talking about – you will probably find subjects that you wish to develop further, ones that you wish to comment on in your own blog (don’t forget to use a trackback!) or ones that simply spark new ideas that you can write about. Other blogs are great sources of current thinking and new potential ideas.

Write a Series

Select a topic and write a set of posts around the theme you have selected. Try to plan the series out in advance (at least the titles) and then write them as you need them. Alternatively, once you get into the series, you may find that you write a number of them all at once. That’s great! But don’t get carried away and post them all together, instead postdate them (in Wordpress, just change the “Post Timestamp”) so that they publish automatically a few days apart.

Revisit old posts you have written

Check back over some of your old posts and see if there are ones that could be developed more fully. You may feel that there are now updates or new information that you would like to add to them, so do so in a new post which references back to the original one and develops the ideas further.

Answer Questions from Comments on Posts

Use contacts from people who have asked for information or have asked questions which have developed on your original post and opened up in turn new areas or topics. Take these questions or the points that they raise and develop the answers into new posts.

Get a guest blogger in

You do not need to write all of the posts yourself, many Business Blogs will in fact have two or even more people working on them. However, if you don’t have people who post regularly, you can still have a “guest blogger” who might come in to post on a particular subject where they have a specialist knowledge.

There is of course a final option – simply take a break from posting for a few days. There’s no issue with that – just let your readers know and they’ll be waiting for your return with bated breath.

Related posts:

1. Generating Ideas for your Business Blog posts
2. How to stop comment spam on your Blog
3. Green Cross Code of Business Blogging

For me, there are two main sources of ideas: you and everyone else.

Blog Post Ideas – You

You want to make sure that you capture all the ideas that come to you and personally I use a nice and easy solution for this: I keep a notebook with me at all times. Why? So that I can note down ideas that occur to me during the course of the day – and, believe me, they can come at the weirdest moments. They could be triggered by any event, by something that I see which sparks a connection or by a comment that somebody makes to me. I note down the idea and any associated thoughts that crop up at the time and then I go back, review and use these ideas as and when I need to.

Blog Post Ideas – Everyone Else

When it comes to “everyone else”, the best people to take ideas from are your customers, your prospects and your partners – these are all the sorts of people who are likely to ask those questions which others would benefit from as well, so can be a great source of inspiration.

So, make a note of the main ones and make a point of talking about them on your blog. Treat it in the same way as you would when you take questions from the audience during a presentation – that’s to say, repeat the question that has been asked so that the rest of the audience can hear and then go ahead and answer it.

Do the same in your blog – you will be providing information which will answer relevant and real questions that should help your customers use your product better and help your prospects to understand its potential better.

So that you have this resource developing on an ongoing basis, I suggest that:

• you keep a folder in your email system and make a copy of both the question you receive and the response you send back – this will in itself form the basis of your business blog post;
• after meetings with clients, prospects or suppliers, note down some of the key questions that they asked and which were clearly on interest to them;
• at Conferences and Exhibitions, keep a record of the questions or the areas that visitors to your stand keep asking about and are showing most interest in.

You’ll soon find that you have topics for your posts planned out well in advance and as you write the posts, you will hopefully also start to receive comments which will start to take the discussions and questions in other directions as well.

Related posts:

1. Generating yet more ideas for your Business Blog
2. Great post titles give great reader figures
3. The Blog Coach returns

When you are starting a blog for your business, it can be all too easy to get carried away, rush into setting up a half baked blog and start writing immediately. If you are in this situation then try employing the Green Cross Code of Business Blogging. I first wrote about this idea at Better Business Blogging but I think that the message is so important that it warrants a reposting here with some additional commentary.

Stop! Wait, don’t rush into writing your blog immediately, you need to plan first and decide the focus of your blog.

Look at some established blogs and see how others go about it. Make sure you read some of these to get a better feel for blogging from those already doing it.

“Listen” to the conversations going on in the blogosphere and to what people are saying in their posts, as well as to as much good advice as you can get.

Think about what you have read and take the time to plan your blog in terms of what you want to say and to whom, as well as in terms of your overall goals for it.

Finally, start to blog with all of these elements in mind but make sure you keep reading other blogs, listening to new ideas and thinking how to develop your blog.

To make a success of a blog, you need to spend time planning a variety of elements on your Blog as you start to develop it, and crucially you should also spend time looking at what is being written about and listening what is being said, before you put “pen to paper” on your first post.

I recognise that there are advocates of a more immediate approach – that of simply starting to blog and gaining experience by actually writing one. I can see the advantages of that and of not falling into the trap of “paralysis by analysis” (ie thinking about it for so long that you don’t actually ever do anything).

But I also know that whatever you write while “gaining experience” will still reflect on you and your business and that once it is out on the internet, then there is no easy way to withdraw it. By taking the time to plan and to read what others are writing about, you will gain confidence when you start to post as well as having a framework to work with – remember that when you start blogging, it is the equivalent of entering an enormous noisy stadium full of people talking rather than sitting down to a quiet one-to-one dinner. It can be intimidating so it’s good to be as comfortable as possible when you start.

So, taking it back to basics, to make sure that you start blogging with confidence, I recommend that when you start your business blog, you follow the Green Cross Code of Business Blogging:

Related posts:

1. Using Technorati to research your future Blog or your Market
2. Generating yet more ideas for your Business Blog
3. Starting to write your Business Blog

We will be looking at all aspects of blogging from the planning and design of blogs and blogsites which deliver on their business objectives, through to their marketing and ongoing development. In all cases, the focus will be firmly focused on the business aspect – not in terms of monetising your blog with adverts and the like, but in using a blog to develop business for your company.

The Blog Coach blogsite is designed and aimed at three main groups:

• corporates, small business and solopreneurs which are either planning or merely thinking about setting up a business blog to work for their businesses;
• those companies looking for ways to develop and/or market a blog which they have already set up for their business;
• anyone interested in understanding more about how to use the Social Media Marketing Toolkit they have at their disposal.

While it isn’t specifically aimed at experienced individual bloggers, I hope that The Blog Coach will be able to offer you something as well and I would welcome comments and feedback from you so that it can be shared with others.

In addition to the main categories which will help you identify areas of particular interest, there are also some guiding categories which will help to give focus to the posts. These will be:

• Planning and Setting up a Blog
• Writing and Developing your Blog
• Business Blog Marketing
• Blogging for your Business
• Corporate Blogging
• New Media / Social Media Marketing Toolkit

Although it will be aimed at and looking at the use of blogging in business sense and how to make it work for you, I hope that people running individual blogs will certainly gain from some of the sections.

So, whatever stage you are at with your Business Blogging, I invite you to dip in on a regular basis – to make that as easy as possible, why not add The Blog Coach to your favourite RSS Reader as well? Hopefully you’ll find the areas that we’re going to be discussing useful as well as interesting, and that you’ll feel the urge to join in!

I look forward to hearing from you.

Related posts:

1. The Blog Coach returns
2. The Blog Coach is spotted!
3. The Blog Coach and why hire a Blogging Consultant

This facility on your blog helps to open up and develop channels of communications between yourself and your readers and can be the perfect way of starting a business relationship. For some blogs, the comments (and what they can lead to) are the main reason they are written in the first place.

So, contrary to some views I hear in organisations thinking about using a blog, your decision should not be whether to allow comments or not, but rather how to elicit comments and how to best handle the ones you receive. Whether you moderate them or allow your visitors to comment freely (having filtered out the spam comments of course – Akismet is great for this), you should consider the fact that people want to comment and want to get involved to be a compliment to your post.

You should also look to encourage it. Ask an open question at the end of your post which is actively looking for responses – this will give people something to focus on in the responses. If you are talking to someone about a subject that you have written on, refer them to the post and ask them to join in and give their view as well.

You should also aim to respond to the comments that are made – after all, you are writing to pique people’s interest in your subject and looking to engage with your readers, so if they respond and ask a question then make sure that you reply to it.

Of course, there are going to be occasions where the comments will not be favourable – this is to be expected. You cannot please all the people all of the time. However, in all but the most extreme cases (I’m thinking primarily here about libellous comments), you really should allow the comments to appear and respond to their points by presenting your point of view. While tempting, it’s best not to ignore this type of comment: after all, you are there to put forward and argue your point of view and you will often gain greater respect by handling objections with grace and tact in this way.

So, comments, and the interaction they bring, are a key element of what make a Business Blog so effective. If you were ever considering not allowing comments then I would urge you to rethink because you would be slamming the door shut on some of the key relationship building opportunities you’ll get.

How do you encourage comments on your blog?

Related posts:

1. Generating yet more ideas for your Business Blog
2. Generating Ideas for your Business Blog posts
3. Green Cross Code of Business Blogging

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.

Related posts:

1. Choosing a name for your Blog
2. Thinking of starting a business blog? Consider this …
3. Running my Blog – is it better to host it myself?

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.

Related posts:

1. What is RSS? A Beginners Guide
2. Plan your Blog: what to consider
3. Finding a Domain name for your Blog

So the question is where the best place to find out what blogs exist in a certain industry or cover certain topics. For me, I always turn to the first of my two main blog site recommendations for anyone intending to use blogs – Technorati. If you want to find out what blogs exist and what is being said in them, then this is the place to start your search.

As you hit Technorati’s homepage, there seems to be a lot going on but for now, let’s just focus on the main search function – we’ll look at the other things you can do in some later posts.

So the main area that you want to concentrate on is the Search Bar:

You can see that you can search through 3 different sets of information: Blog posts, Tags and the Blog Directory.

• Blog posts: this is the widest search and it looks through all of the information contained in the posts of the blogs on Technorati.
• Tags: these are like categories that an author can assign to an individual post (or indeed to pictures or links) and gives the best idea of how the author would describe the content.
• Blog Directory: the directory looks at the individual Blogs as a whole and assigns them to subsections of the directory. When a blogger “claims” a blog on Technorati (we’ll come to that in a later post), then they can add the categories they wish to appear in as well.

I always advise starting with the “Blog Posts” search as it gives you a wide search but the “Tags” are an excellent second bet and are becoming ever more widely used and hence useful.

Once you have your first set of results, Technorati then allows you to refine them. I have used the example of a search on “RSS Marketing” below.

You have 3 options to help you refine the results, each with its own pull down menu – you can use just one or all three of them.

• The first allows you to choose the “additional search terms” that Technorati has suggested which also appear in blue just below and gives you posts which contain both “RSS marketing” and, for example, “Business Blogging”. This helps to narrow your search.
• The second allows you to set a level of authority which Technorati determines by the number of blogs which link to the blog you are looking at – “any authority” will give you all blogs which fit your search terms.
• And the third, allows you to select blogs only in a certain language.

So now we have a set of results which hopefully reflects the posts that contain the information that we are looking for. An example from the excellent Problogger is given below as an example.

However, this gives us more than just this post to use in our research. For example:

• By clicking on the Post Title, we go through to the blog where we can see if there are additional posts which interest us. There is also likely to be a “blogroll” or “recommended sites” section on the blog which will often link to other sites which will be of interest. Blogs often become the hub of a network in their own right so start with one that interests you and follow their recommendations
• By clicking on the Blog Name, you will get additional information about the blog and other posts that as well as an overview of the main areas that it covers
• By clicking on the Blogger’s name, you can see if they write other Blogs which might be of interest to you
• By clicking on the Linked Sites, you can see which blogs have linked to the one you are interested in and also which sites it has linked to in turn. By following these links, you can quickly get a list of blogs to read and return to.

So using Technorati, we can quickly gain an list of blogs which will be of interest to us and also of use in developing our own Business Blog. To save time, make sure you add them to your RSS Reader (you can always delete them later) so that you can follow them easily and keep up to date.

Related posts:

1. Will Google and Yahoo find my Blog?
2. Feedburner: making RSS work for you