Hello Again!!

This week has been full of blessings! One major blessing in my life is David Walker and he has agreed to guest post on my blog! David is a professional blogger and internet marketer and he is enjoying the financial freedom that the internet can bring. He is actually “living the dream”!

Thank you David! I am honored!! Please leave your questions and/or comments below!

By now you’re probably familiar with blogging. If not, a blog in it’s simplest form is an online diary displayed in reverse chronological order (i.e. most recent entry first). A blog will generally be updated regularly and written in the first person rather than the third which is a common technique used on web pages.

Blogging for business is becoming very popular as companies, both online and bricks-and-mortar see the numerous benefits from doing so. Here, David Walker discusses five advantages of blogging for business.

1. Easy to Set Up

There are several blogging platforms available that are free of charge and easy to set up. WordPress is the primary example of an open source blogging platform that is free to use.

The good thing about WordPress is that there are various free themes (templates) available for you to change the way the website looks without being technical.

When you start to make money online and want something a little more bespoke, you can hire somebody to create a tailor-made design unique to your business.

The costs to create a theme are focused much more on the overall design than traditional web development costs which focus a lot on what goes on “under the hood”.

2. Quick and Easy to Keep Your Customers Updated

Writing a blog entry is quicker and easier than a web page update.

First of all you simply have to log into the administrator section of your blog and you’re ready to go. This means you can update the blog from anywhere with an internet connection.

Blog entries are written in the first person as an individual blogger, rather than as the ‘organisation’ and hence you don’t have to be as precise with the spelling and grammar although that doesn’t mean you should take a sloppy approach to blogging.

The blog should be the first place you tell customers about new products or developments.

3. Search Engine Friendly

Blogs in their nature are updated frequently and often rich in content.

It is for these reasons, search engines love blogs more than any other form of content delivery at the moment.

Blog posts are usually to the point and representative of what people are talking about whether it’s a news item, pop culture reference or product and another reason blog posts rank well in the search engines.

Blog posts are very “linkable”. Somebody may write an opinionated blog post and another blogger may disagree, write a blog post from an opposing view point and link to the first post as a point of reference.

These links will also help your overall search engine position.

4. Build a Relationship With Your Readers

When blogging you will blog as an individual on behalf of the company. This enables you to be more open and transparent in your opinions and thought than if you were simply “towing the company line”.

For this reason you readers (customers) will be able to associate with you as a human being. This will establish a much closer, stronger relationship and will extend the overall lifespan of a particular customer.

5. Get Opinions From Your Customers

Blogs are great to gage opinion from your customers.

Each post can allow readers to add comments, offer their opinions and contribute to the discussion.

This is a much more interactive way to deliver content than the traditional format of simply “broadcasting” your message on a static website giving your customers no way of responding.

The opinions of your customers can help you make educated business decisions in the future – at the very least you can find out the type of content they respond to and give more of it to them!

I am in John Thornhill’s Masterclass and I am supposed to be writing an ebook. I was actually supposed to have that done a while ago!

I have a niche, I have a passion, I know what I want to write, I know what I want to say, I know what I want it to look like so what’s the prob?!?!

I have the website, graphics, table of contents and a thousand ideas in my head of what I want to include in my book.

I just can’t write it.  I start writing and putting ideas on paper and it all just turns into mush.  Mush in my head, mush on paper, ideas are mush…just total, complete, undeniable MUSH!!

Sometimes, I actually just want to say screw it and forget the whole thing! In fact, I did, once. Then I look at how far I have come, how much time and energy I have put into this, what I really want to do with my life(that’s a BIG one!!) and I sit back down and get back to the mush.

Discipline.

Gotta have tons more discipline.

dis•ci•pline

Self-discipline refers to the training that one gives one’s self to accomplish a certain task or to adopt a particular pattern of behavior, even though one would really rather be doing something else (stole this from Wiki)

See that “even though one would really rather be doing something else” part??

That’s me.

We only do what we really want to do. Human nature. Why would someone want to write a bunch of mush when they could be hanging out with the kids(they grow so fast!!) or on Twitter, Skype, reading other peoples blogs or helping a fellow blogger with ideas? That’s a total feel-good deal. YAY!

Writing something that looks like mush that gets your head spinning so fast you just wanna holler STOP!!!? Not so feel-good. BLAH!

I have gobs of self-discipline.  I have to.  Just not on this.

Time management? Got that down. Work all day, write when I can. Less sleep means more time to do. Duh! How hard could that be?

What do you do when you have to do something that is not so feel-good? Curl up in the fetal position and cry for your mama? Eat like there is no tomorrow? Have a little drinky or two (or 10?)??

Or something more productive like making a list of your goals for the day and sticking with it? Or writing out your dreams and aspirations and sticking them on your computer so you can see them everyday and remember why you started this in the first place?? Go for a bike ride? Cook like a chef?

What???

Let me know and I hope y’all have an AMAZING DAY!!!

Lisa~