maisha's blog

The biggest challenge for bloggers is usually not content but readers. 

Here is the list of proven techniques, used by real small business owners, for getting new readers to check out your blog and then getting them to come back and become loyal readers.

Top 13 Ways to Drive Blog Readership
http://blog.inc.com/e-commerce/2010/01/13_proven_techniques_to_attrac.html

Why would you spend hours publishing free content and then more hours making sure people read it?

The purpose of blogging in general, is usually to establish and/or support an existing brand with an understanding of how that brand generates revenue.

Outside of the fact that you happen to be reading one right now, I find that there are lots of smart, business savvy folks out there who when placed in the position of having to explain, strategize or build a blog (or decide if one should be built at all) are at a bit of a loss. Blogs are usually easy for most people to recognize but harder for folks to define.

As of this writing, there are 47 million professional profiles on LinkedIn. How many of them represent your prospects, future partners, or happy customers just waiting to write a testimonial for you? After 6 articles on the topic you now have no excuse not to find out. :o)
 

Strategies, a LinkedIn profile guide, a LinkedIn feature guide, case studies and many user and reader contributions:

Maisha Walker's Inc. magazine series - a Small Business Owner's Guide to Leveraging LinkedIn

Depending on what kind of "entity" you are, you have 3 choices for how to create a presence on Facebook. As I mentioned in A Guide to Social Media Tools and their Uses, many of the social tools handle "entities" differently. The kind of presence you would set up for a business vs. a person in LinkedIn is not the same as what you would set up on Facebook, which makes for a very confusing experience for someone just trying to understand how to get started.

In my view Twitter, like many marketing and social media tools, is basically a stage. How you present yourself upon it depends on what talents you have and what you're trying to accomplish.

Below, I've outlined 9 methods of interacting on Twitter. This list should either allow you to comfortably ignore Twitter because none of these methods of interaction are feasible or meaningful for you, or recognize an opportunity for yourself or your business.

READ FULL ARTICLE

Social media tools empower you, using tools that are largely free, to maximize your business' exposure and interaction, connecting and staying in touch more often and with more people than you ever could before.  But how do you do that?  What are the best social media marketing tools for small businesses?

READ FULL ARTICLE

In the high-rolling '90's, entire businesses were formed based on the concept of "Link Farming".  Now the process of getting links to your site to build "link popularity" is more complicated.  Search Engines now focus on "one directional" links – where sites link to you but you do not link back to them.

Last time we covered how to create your keyword list - the foundation of all of your other SEO and SEM efforts.

Now let's talk about what to do once those keywords are selected – step #2 is building keyword density.

I started this Search Engine Marketing Series with a definition of the two SEM areas – Search Engine Advertising and Search Engine Optimization. Last week we focused on SEO with SEO My Web Site in 3 Easy? Steps. We discussed the three elements of SEO and what I call their "blind spots".