I am speaking from experience here as I try to drop some pounds (many in fact) … but keeping a website or Blog going is like being on a diet:

• You have to have a big picture goal - something to aim for. The more realistic, the better.
• You have to find something that works for you. It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution.
• The more varied you diet, the better chance you have of sticking with it.
• You need to cut some things out that don’t help you one your quest
• You need to add more of other things that get the desired results
• You need to work out from the two points above, which is which.
• You need to have the odd day off otherwise you may go mad.
• Regular measurement is good, but remember the main goal and big milestones - they are the results that count, not the daily micro measurements.
• When the going gets tough, a constant reminder of why you are doing it is needed, rather than slipping in the short-term.

Anyway, that’s my thought for the day… back to the salad and, of course, the Blogging.

I have a friend who approached me recently for an all singing, all dancing website with a budget that couldn’t even raise a tune.

Anyway, not a project for The Escape, I produced it as a favour with the help of another friend.

It just goes to show what you can do to create a content-management system with Wordpress.

CBS Recruit does just that, allowing my friend to update his case studies and jobs, keeping his website relevant for less than £1000. I am now trying to teach him the fine art of content creation.

There are a whole host of cheaper ways of doing this of course if you can keep your website structure simple in Wordpress, using off-the-shelf templates.

Then you have Joomla (I’m not a big fan of this to be honest) or plain old blogging.

If it was me setting up a new business and I didn’t have a budget, I would actually go for a Blog.

Wordpress, hosted on your domain name. You need a little knowledge of how to do this but it’s all out there if you are a bit savvy.

I reckon the cost of a .co.uk domain is £2.99 for the year, Wordpress hosting I have found for $70 per year (£35). A free wordpress template and you have a web platform for less than £50 per year.

And, coming back to the situation with my friend’s website… it’s the content that is the real investment required.

I am always looking for new techniques to increase my pull of natural search traffic. Blogging regularly is one of these and sometimes I am left scratching my head about what to write. More importantly, when I do have a topic, how can I craft it to attract the traffic and convert it into a sale.

One way of attracting traffic is by using keywords in your content. It’s an important part of defining your content. I am not a big one for going over the top with keyword [over] saturation though.

Plain attraction by using keyword saturation is a tactic that works for many affiliate sites, that simply rely on numbers of visitors, but for a business website we are not interested in simply attracting traffic - we want leads, or sales. All to often a company may pop up in the search engine, you visit the site and can’t make head or tail of what they are saying due to improper use of keywords.

The idea of using keywords is this is that you define a key-word, or key-phrase and use it within your content to attract search engine traffic. ie. If a search engine can see your page has the word ‘basingstoke’ in for instance, it can establish that you have a value against that phrase. So, if someone searches for the term, you may appear.

Of course, you are competing with everyone else who wants to be found for the same phrase.

Recent advice is to use Long Tail search terms. These are more specific terms and utilise longer key phrases, “website designer in Basingstoke”.

Keyword Research

You can use free keyword tools, such as Wordtracker or Google… along with everyone else, or you could use variations of the same phrase you want to be found for.

One tip I have never really thought about too much is to craft your Blog posts completely around a key phrase or phrases. It’s not my idea by the way - credit to Om4.

This is exceptionally useful with topical issues that affect your business, or locality based articles. I often take a generic story and put a Basingstoke angle on it for my local Basingstoke Business News website. eg. This story is for a company rolling out broadband in three towns; Basingstoke is just one of them.

This Blogging technique also allows you to build additional anchor text links to your web pages. (anchor text is the text you select as the link to another page - eg. web consultant in Basingstoke).

To find what’s happening for certain key phrases, or in my home town, I often use Google News search and Blog Search. I also use Google Alerts to get updates sent regularly to my e-mail inbox for certain more obscure ‘keywords’.

By taking your topic, or source words, you can begin to craft articles and Blog Posts to answer peoples questions, attract traffic and push it through to your selling pages.

I updated an article on The Escape website last week - Top Ten Blogging Tips - so I reworded the previous “intro” article and thought it would be worth posting…

Blogs allow people to communicate regularly, quickly and easily, through the web and you could be using one for your business to allow quick and easy reach to your existing clients and potentials.

By using special blogging website software, no programming knowledge is required, enabling you to start your own Blog, often on free platforms, such as Blogger, or Wordpress (Wordpress does take some setting up).

In general, Bloggers tend to fall into one of four camps:

1. The personal Blogger, using their Blog to communicate to family and friends, or impress their general views of the world onto an audience (usually a small audience at that).
2. The Blogging professional, who makes money directly from their Blog either through advertising, affiliate marketing, attracting very large audiences along the way. This is a numbers game.
3. The knowledge Blogger, usually on a niche subject, attracting an audience (or fan base) by sharing their
   knowledge. Some knowledge bloggers create knowledge products (books, videos, etc.) that they can then sell off the back of their knowledge.
4. The corporate Blogger. Usually an influential person within a company, blogging about that company, it’s services or products, and generally interacting with the customer community. There is sometimes a cross-over with knowledge thrown in.

The benefit for you and your small business is number four.

The advantages of Blogging

To get a benefit from any marketing, it is important to have a goal - something that you want to achieve. Blogging can take a large investment of your time and energy (or budget if you outsource) so it is important to remember that you want something back.

This goal may be to raise your profile within an industry, or to communicate with your customer-base. It is very unlikely that you will make money directly from your Blog (no.s 2 or 3 above), unless you have some unique, expert knowledge and spend a lot of your time researching and creating articles, and participating in online communities to create your audience.

That said, a basic business Blog is a great way to communicate with your existing customers and to raise your industry profile, as long as you keep to the basics. Keep it interesting, on message, always with the thought of what you want back, under-pinning any posts you create.

Example posts

I often get asked “but what will I write about?”

I tend to use my daily interactions with clients, suppliers and the industry in general. Sometimes that yields a couple of posts a day, other times I go a couple of weeks before something worthwhile comes along.

It is hard work, but the more you notice things and create your posts, the more you… well… notice new things that are worth writing about.

The result can add to increasing your website traffic funnel.

This is an introduction and overview, rather than a big long technical document about RSS. That can be found here, amongst other places.

What is RSS?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.

Imagine taking some information and being able to distribute it online so other machines and software can easily make sense of it. A bit like when someone has an Excel file and exports it as tab separated text, so they can send it to someone else who doesn’t have Excel. It’s the same principle and uses a language called XML. That’s as technical as it gets! It’s a file format for ‘wrapping up’ information.

Who use RSS now and why?

Lot’s of people use RSS to distribute news, product updates, etc. and it has mainly grown in popularity due to the fact that most blogs can distribute their content as RSS automatically. For instance, the feed for this blog is wrapped up nicely through a piece of software called Feedburner. You can see it very basically through this link.

The reason RSS works so well is that when you update your database, or add another blog post or news item, the RSS feed updates chronologically straight away. This makes it especially great for distributing news. Think one of those ticker tape screens at the stock exchange. Anyone subscribed to your feed hears about it quickly.

So why does a small business need to embrace RSS?

Quite simply - you are offering your customers a transparent way of choosing to let you communicate with them (you may want to re-read that). It’s about who controls the flow of the marketing message.

Take traditional marketing for instance. As a consumer, you hand over your details to a company (or they take them) and then they send you marketing messages. Some are relevant, some are not, but, even though you are the one that controls your own purse, you don’t control the flow of the message.

Mr Marketer is driving the marketing bus… he repeats his message to you on a regular basis so you don’t forget him, whether you like it or not and, nine times out of ten, you can’t tell him to stop.

And, before you know it, lots of different marketers have your details and your are receiving lots of marketing information that you may not want. Some of the marketing companies also share your details increasing the number of different marketing messages you get. Lot’s of buses, in lot’s of directions - lots of messages - and you want to get off! You want some control…

RSS and control

RSS may seem like the antithesis of marketing as it gives you a way of communicating whereby the customer holds the keys. If you don’t treat them nicely, they can clear the communication channel and you’ve lost them as a marketer.

Take a Blog for example. Your Customer may find it by accident, decide it is worth reading, then subscribe to the RSS feed. They haven’t had to hand over any e-mail details or address, or how many people over 16 live in their household. They’ve just pressed a button and next time your blog says something new, they will hear about it.

As consumers (your customers) have wised up to the wily ways of marketers, they are much less likely to hand over their information in the first place, so they love the control. There are two key reasons for this:

1. People don’t trust marketers because at the end of the day, they are trying to sell them something and history tells them that they are not to be trusted.
2. The internet has made so much information so widely available that very few companies are really that unique anymore. So a consumer can quite easily pick and choose who they buy from. If it’s not you,they can quickly find another.

As the consumer it’s great - you are suddenly driving your bus of marketers around. You have control.

Working harder, smarter and more effectively

As a business marketing itself, it doesn’t seem like a rosy picture. But, one of the great things about supplying information to your customer base as a news feed using RSS is that you get to show off the things people buy from you, namely expertise and knowledge, and people can pick and choose whether they take note of each story or not.

People who read RSS feeds (and Blogs) tend to skim read anyway and pick out the stories that relate to them (a bit like the way you may read a newspaper or magazine) so as long as your overall message stays relevant to them, they shouldn’t have any problems sticking with you.

This should also encourage you to work harder on your message, keeping your subscribers (customers/audience) happy and potentially attracting new people who relate to your message along the way who buy into you.

This is an important point, especially in small businesses. How many times have you heard the phrase, “I am buying into you, just as much as the company”?

Conclusion

Many marketers still can not come to terms with letting go of control and the power the consumer has. I’ve even had a meeting with a marketing guy who wanted to phone each person when they unsubscribed from his e-mail newsletter to find out why. No wonder consumers have become suspicious.

Whether you use RSS as a Blog, or simply to distribute your company news, it is a very cost-effective way to create a marketing channel. A place where people can buy into you and your message on their terms.

Feedburner is a great tool for sharing your blog feeds and allowing subscribers to read your articles the way they want.

I have also discovered by accident (it’s probably been there for months) one of the Publicize tools within Feedburner called BuzzBoost,which allows you to take that feed and simply insert it onto another website as HTML.

A bit like I have with my own…

Blogging is seen (and talked about) as being a great way to engage with your ‘audience’. That’s alright for the authors and early adopters who have an audience of 100’s of thousands of people, but a couple of months in and you are getting maybe 2 visitors a day, should you give up?

Lot’s of people do give up quickly, maybe because there isn’t an instant reaction to the things they are saying. Maybe we all deep down think we are going to be the next Seth Godin or Aaron Wall and we soon realise we’re not.

There is also lots of advice out there for the best way to blog about the best way to blog but some of the best tips I have are:

• People get bored quickly - are you really that interesting?
• For every blog, there are a thousand others saying the same things, maybe in a better way.
• Unless you are a serious blogger, chances are your numbers will be low.
• Blog traffic is hard to measure - some people view the pages online, some read the feed. Feedburner helps but you can’t guarantee which feed the person is reading.

Don’t let me put you off though - let’s face it, this is my first post on a new blog.

Remember though, it’s bloody hard work. If, however, you get a small audience of five of your existing clients, and they really buy into what you say, then surely, I would count that as a success - it’s all relative after all.