Small Business Design Resources

What is Blogging

A lot of websites these days use blogging as a way to draw customers. Blogging means posting a fresh article to your site every day, every week, or at some other interval that makes sense to you. Blogs can be useful to customers who may check out your website regularly to find out new information related to your product, your service or your company. New customers may be led to your site using keyword searches or by following links from other sites that reference your site, or from links you embed in other articles on your website.

The primary purpose of a blog is to provide fresh content for your website to keep your customers coming back. They want to see what new products you are offering, hear what’s new in your company, and see what additional services are available. A blog is also a great way to add fresh content to your site to keep it at the top of the search engines.

But what should you write in the blog? And how can you keep coming up with new ideas for blogging?

There are some definite advantages to blogging and once you get the hang of it you might just get hooked:

1. Writing helps you think. And thinking about your business is something you should be doing every day. You can use blogging as a way to explore new ideas for your website, your product or your business.

2. Blogging invites customer feedback. Create a blog with a comment block where blog readers can post their feedback. This is a great way to find out what your customers think. You can ask them questions directly, and use the responses to begin an email contact list. The best part about this is your feedback is coming directly from current users of your website. You can even take it a step further and start sending email articles directly to your blog fans. Can’t decide whether to branch out in this direction or that direction? Ask for customer feedback directly in your blog. Everyone loves to give their opinion.

3. Blogging is a catalyst for doing research. If you sit down once a week and come up with 7 topics for daily blogs, or sit down once a month and come up with 4 topics for weekly blogs, you will remain on your toes as well have new content to keep your website fresh. You can research the competition and find out what they are blogging about, or research a particular aspect of your business, describe the special features of an existing product or introduce features for a new product and motivate readers to give it a try.

4. Blogging is a great tool for stimulating your own learning. Because you will be on the internet, checking your competition, doing your research and finding interesting things to write about, you will be acquiring new knowledge constantly about your business field. Becoming an expert in your field is an absolute must for out-maneuvering the competition and your website is the perfect place to display your expertise.

To get started blogging, map out a few ideas, determine how many words you want to write in your blog (300 to 500 is plenty to begin, but don’t restrict yourself if you get on a roll). Don’t forget to create a few links in your blog to other similar articles on your website.

What is a FTP?

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. FTP is used for downloading and uploading files from the web, such as documents, images and mp3. Basically it’s your computer connecting to a server and getting or placing files on that server. On the back end, it works just like the folder system on your home computer. You can create, name, and delete folders and sub folders.

How can I use a FTP? You will need to download a software that is referred to as a FTP client. There are many FTP clients to chose from, but one that I like to recommend is a free, secure, cross-platform that is an add on to the Firefox browser called FireFTP. See how to install FireFTP plugin on your computer.

To have access to a particular web site’s FTP, you would need to request the login and password from the web site designer.

Why can’t I use my e-mail to send files? You can still use e-mail to send files, but a FTP is a great alternative. With e-mail you can send only a hand full of documents at a time. Many servers wont send e-mails that are too big in file size. Plus, attachments in an e-mail need to be encoded and that increases the file size. With FTP on the other-hand, you’re able to send bigger files and they’re not encoded.

When would I need to use a FTP instead of e-mail? For example, when you’re working with a web designer to build your web site, the designer will ask you to upload your images or any relevant files to them using their FTP. You will then be provided with a login and password to upload your files.

What is Link-building?

To understand link-building, first you’ll need to know what is link popularity. Link popularity simply refers to the number and quality of links that are pointing to your site. This shows how popular your site is. If done correctly, this has a great impact on your SEO ranking. If for example the sites that are linking to yours are spam sites, than you will get a lower ranking, but if the sites that are linking to yours are positive sites you’ll get a higher ranking.

So link-building is when you establish a connection with other web sites and ask them to include your link on their site. The search engines want your site to link from authoritative sites, or to have your links come from sites that share the same interest as your site.

The most common way of building links is by link exchange. This is when you exchange links with the site that you want your link to appear on. Now, remember that not every site owner will agree to a link exchange, specially if they’re your competition.

Here are some tips on link exchange:
1. Exchange links from web sites that will bring your target audience to your site. Target audience are visitors that would be interested in your products/services.

2. DO NOT request a link exchange just from anybody. For example, if you’re selling shoes don’t request a link exchange from a dentist. This would not benefit your target audience and in fact may lower your ranking with the search engines.

3. Make sure your web site is complete with valuable content for your visitors. Most web site owners will not exchange links with you if there’s nothing of interest to your target audience on your site.

4. Keep your link pages to a maximum of 25 links per page and make sure it’s search engine friendly.

5. When requesting for a link exchange, Always add their link on your page first and them request a for them to place your link on their site.

6. Keep your link title and description short. Try to keep the description to no more than 200 characters.

7. Make it even easier for them to include your link on their site, give them the exact HTML code to cut and paste on their site. You can even create banners/buttons with your link and provide that for a link exchange.