5 Great Reasons to Add a Business Blog to Your Website

5 Great Reasons to Start a Business Blog:

1. Search engines like Google have increasingly emphasized adding new material to your website on a frequent and recurring basis. Those sites that do not add content often aren’t showing up in Google’s search results at the top anymore. It’s a fact of life that your business site must be adding content all the time to be seen as relevant in whatever niche your business is focused on. Adding a blog helps with this immensely. Shoot for updating your blog daily for best results.

2. Before blogs you had to create a new page at your website to announce something… To add a new blog page takes as long as it takes you to type it and hit “publish”. Your business blog can be kept up to date with just snippets of information instead of building whole pages. You can post short notes of 2-3 lines to let everyone know some crucial information – like a sale or a deadline.

3. With a blog for your business you can share a part of your personality – of yourself and your company, with the public. Blogs make it easy to share not only text, but photos, mp3s, videos, links, phone numbers and other ways to reach you like at Twitter and Facebook. As your personality shows through your blog you’ll be able to make connections with people you’d not otherwise make. You’ll help visitors feel more at home and more like they know you. Adding a blog adds this crucial dimension to your customer’s online experience.

4. A business blog gives visitors another way to connect with you besides phone and email. The comments section of your business blog can do wonders for answering questions and connecting with potential customers that may have never called or emailed you with a comment. Use the comments section to add complete answers to questions that everyone can read and learn from. Use the comments section to show the human side of your business.

5. Blogs enable a business owner to add, remove and edit content easily without the need for a webmaster. Business owners can make changes themselves – the blog empowers them to make instant changes, and announcements. for you.

10 Big Florida Business Website Design Mistakes NOT to Make

Making mistakes on a personal blog, if you’re not trying to make money or present some professional image – is OK. Making mistakes on your business website is not OK, and it may be holding you back from doing as well as you would like to. Some business owners will just re-use their personal website theme and style for their business website. Saving time and energy when you create your business site are not things you should be considering.

Here are 10 big mistakes that many business owners make with their websites. Stay clear of these!

1. Weak Planning – most of you won’t sit down and plan out your business site in detail. You will likely leave it to someone else to create for you and you’ll approve it if it is generally what you wanted. Take control and plan the design of your site. The entire format should be your ideas, coupled with what works for other major sites in your niche – or maybe even outside your niche. It is a safe bet that companies like Amazon, and other major companies are going with what works. It may work for you too.

Plan your columns, width of site, fonts, size of fonts, space between lines, header image, everything really. This business site is to represent your business – and must be professional, and attractive in design. Don’t skimp! Instead of going with everything you want – put it up for discussion at a meeting of your staff. Include everyone – not just the top management. Everything needs to be analyzed by the group. Your ideas might NOT be the best.

At most your business site can have 3 goals, and should have them in most cases:

a. Share info about you, your business, your products and services.

b. Sell something.

c. Collect leads for email marketing later.

2. Impossible to Find Contact Info – I can’t count the times I’ve hunted around for an email address or contact form for the owner of a site. Sometimes I want to help by telling them I see an error.Sometimes I need more info before I purchase. Sometimes I want to gripe someone out! Make contact information on every page in an easy to see location. Keep it in the same place on every page.

3. 404 Errors – broken links to pages and also images should be fixed and never allowed to remain. Fix them as soon as you find them. If you have a WordPress site you can use the “Redirection” plugin to find errors in your site and redirect visitors to the proper page.

4. Outdated Information – It is bad enough that some website owners don’t date their articles and so you might be reading something written in the past century. Some date it rather recent, and it’s still outdated information. Strive to keep all of the information on your business site current – there is nothing good about spreading old, bad information.

5. Aesthetics Nightmare – if you are not an artist or graphics person, please don’t choose the colors and style of your business website. At least run it by a few members of your staff – those that will give you a straight answer when asked for their opinion. I wonder how in the world some of the color combinations I see ever saw the light of day. I imagine they were grandfather’s favorite colors or something. The style of your website must be kept current and easy on the eyes – and that’s always a changing dynamic.

6. Dead End Pages – sometimes I’ll be surfing a site I like a lot and all the sudden I reach the equivalent of a dead end street. There are no links to click to move forward or backward and I have to go find the browser’s back button. This is not a good idea for your business site.

7. Killing the Back Button! This doesn’t happen much, but sometimes webmasters break the back button using code to disable it. It is a killer mistake as nobody wants to be forced to move ahead if it is time to bail. Stop this practice on your business site immediately!

8. Pop-Ups – these are beginning to be popular again, though not in the same style as the past. Currently a good style of popup is the kind used at Aweber that involves a fading in of the page overtop what the visitor is looking at – the rest of the page blacks out and all you can see is the popup. If this is done a minute after the visitor arrives and the fade is rather gradual – it doesn’t provoke such a negative reaction. Don’t use old-pop-styles.

9. Giant Home Page – your internet connection might be a T1, but not all your visitors have that. Create index pages that are easy to download for 90% of your visitors and the other 10% know they have a bandwidth issue and will wait if they really want to see your site. You cannot optimize your site for everyone, but think top 90% and you’ll be on the right track.

Delete all Flash and replace large movies and images with smaller sized media.

10. Using Cutting Edge Tech – your website should be able to be viewed and enjoyed by the top 90% of visitors. Shoot for that. Using Apple’s QuickTime mp4 videos that require a program download and updating to the latest video codecs is NOT hitting 90%. Get over yourself and use technology that most of the world has – unless you have a tech blog or other business in which users actually dig updates.

Put these tips into practice with every business website you develop. There are many other things to learn about running a business successfully in these times – but, these tips will help quite a bit.

Digital Video to Market Your Florida Business

Online video will be one of the prime ways to market your Florida business in the years to come. Just now, in 2010 video is starting to be recognized as the ultimate marketing tool – even for small business owners with few resources. There are kids on YouTube right now making a couple thousand dollars per week just by creating their own bizarre videos. It is not for brain surgeons, it is for you!

Why should you use video for your corporate marketing?

Video marketing in the past was only for large companies with lots of cash. Shooting videos for television is a couple thousand dollars per day expense. Few small Florida companies delved right in and shot lots of video. Everything is changing now. Small companies are incorporating video into their business marketing plans and it is hardly making a dent. Why is that?

Over the past couple of years we’ve seen entry-level video become the norm – even in business. This has, in a way, opened the door for every small company to get involved in producing video – without fear. It is not hard to create business videos inside your home or yard… sitting by your pool, or at your office.

Paying professional video companies is still expensive – it is big business because most companies still they need to pay the outrageous fees and get ultimate quality. The average acceptable quality video for the web can be shot with a $200 camera. No joke.

6 Facts About Video Marketing You Need to Know:

1. Hosting video is nothing special anymore. GoDaddy shared hosting can even handle it. I use BlueHost shared hosting and KnownHost virtual private servers and any of the three can handle video downloads. The speeds aren’t blazing speed, but when you’re paying $5 per month per site, what do you expect? It is fast enough for almost all users. There is no special streaming necessary anymore from your website server.

Probably there is no reason at all for you to host your videos anyway. Sign up with YouTube, Vimeo, Blip.tv, or other free video hosting site and expose your videos to the millions of people watching video each day there.

2. Expensive camcorders are not necessary for web video. A Sony Cybershot digital camera that also shoots video at 640×480 resolution and 30 frames per second is really all you need. As years go on that standard will be raised, but we’ve been using it successfully for the past 3 years and the video results we get is just fine.

3. You don’t need expensive software programs like Adobe Premiere, or Final Cut Pro. For most projects you can use either Microsoft’s Movie Maker or QuickTime for Mac computers.

4. Don’t spend your time and money on converting your video to 6 different types so everyone online can view it. Instead, when you upload to YouTube or one of the other video hosts nearly anyone can view your videos there.

5. Marketing video is not expensive. One of the fastest ways to get your videos out to as large an audience as possible is to join TubeMogul. They will send your video out to a number of online video services for you after you upload your video to them. This saves you hours of time with just a handful of videos.

6. You don’t need a professional video company helping you. Practice until you have something that works. You probably can produce video that is engaging, and technically adequate to use for your business website. Shoot and re-shoot. Rome wasn’t built in a day, neither will your product videos. Study other videos in your niche to see what works and what doesn’t. You can learn an awful lot by studying what others have already done.

Is Email Marketing the Ultimate Way to Market Your Florida Business?

There are entire businesses that are based on just email today, as there were a decade ago. In the past the emails were untargeted and sent in large enough volume that a.05% click through rate gave the person sending emails a couple thousand dollars at a time. Do this over and over a few times each day and that’s a business. A great business as long as it’s legal.

Pay close attention – this is how some savvy online companies are using email as a model for their business.

Email companies first build sales pages called “landing pages”. This is where they will send potential buyers of their products. A landing page, and you’ve seen them before, are usually long and filled with product information. The entire purpose of the landing page is to create a sale for anyone that lands there. Another goal might be to collect an email address so a sale can be made at a later date and after some more email.

Converting these potential buyers to email leads so you can contact them later (permission based marketing) can give you nice profits over time. The typical strategy is to send numerous emails giving free value to the client before you ask them to buy something from you.

You might want to take a minute and look up “Adam Short” in Google. Adam devotes all his time to creating email campaigns for small niche sites he created to target small markets. At a count of 90+ websites that collect leads in different niches, he has a considerable amount of people on each email list. He sends them an automated series of emails from his Aweber account and counts the money as the orders come in. The series of emails he sends is a sales tool that is designed to give a lot of free value, all while selling one of his short eBooks for about $14.95 each. Adam makes 6 figure income per year from these sites.

Here’s basically the process Adam follows:

Visit Amazon.com and look at “Books” main headings in the drop-down menu. Once in the book section choose a category. Self help category works well. When the self help page opens you’ll see subcategories to choose from. Try any of them. next page pops up there are sub-categories I can choose from. I chose the topic of “Eating Disorders”. I think it couldn’t be too difficult to create an eBook to help someone with eating disorders conquer their illness.

I go more sub-niche and decide my eBook will be about helping people cope with binge-eating. Using Microsoft Word I create the 48 page eBook – really putting some effort into it so I can help someone conquer this horrible issue. If you’re not a writer you could outsource it to someone that will write it for a couple hundred bucks. You can probably sell your eBook for $19.95. Many authors choose that as a price.

Back to your email campaign. You should create 10-20 brief emails filled with great information for your target audience. In this case, those with binge eating problems. Give away a lot of information for free in these emails. You’re building trust at this stage and it must be done.

Don’t even ask readers of your email to buy something until the 3rd or 4th email. Ask only sporadically – maybe every 3 or 4 emails you send out. Don’t ask every email – that gets old immediately. Some interesting internet marketing studies have shown that most sales happen after the potential customer reads about six emails from you, not just one or two. For your automated business email campaigns it is tough to beat Aweber – the industry standard.

On your niche website offer something free in exchange for the visitors email address so you have permission to start mailing them your 10-20 auto emails. There are heaps of online sites about how to build effective landing pages that help you convert readers into buyers of your eBooks. Use them.

From each email in which you’re pitching the sale of your eBook make the links go back to your landing page which should have a higher conversion rate after a number of emails read by buyers, in comparison to those visitors that saw your site one time and then your landing page. A long-term relationship with customers is what is indicated for success right now. Follow that plan and grow your email list, your eBook products, and your business.

7 Marketing Ideas for Your Florida Business

1. Local or national radio! Local radio still works for small areas – if your business depends on local traffic. Radio spots can be cheap and effective, depending on your target audience. Specials, coupons, and sales work well when used on radio. A great tactic is to mention your website in the radio ad multiple times to give more information.

2. Under table-glass at restaurants, in restrooms, on taxis, and other public places. Billboards and signs that are stuck in the dirt around high traffic areas work well if they’re legal in your area. Don’t forget local groups shirts – sports teams, or sponsoring anyone that asks.

3. Television. As television dies a slow death because everyone is moving to online advertising there are bound to be some great deals that can be made. Television used to charge a premium. Those days are drawing to a close.

4. Local directory websites. Find local “yellow pages” type internet directories that get a lot of traffic in your area and advertise there. I know a number of small companies in Tampa, Florida that have been using this as their primary method of drawing new business for years now.

5. Networking as marketing. Attend trade-shows, seminars, conferences related to your business focus. Attendees at these events are often pleasantly surprised at who they connect with – even if they’re not good at networking to begin with. The proximity of people that need what others have makes it a win. Don’t neglect going – or sending someone as a representative of your company if you think it might help.

6. Email! Adding your signature line to all your outgoing email is free marketing because you’d be sending it anyway – right? In addition you could pursue email blasts – renting a large email list to target additional potential buyers.

One of the most successful tactics recently is to build an email list of potential and current customers and build trust with them – giving value for free over and over before asking them to purchase something. This has immense potential and most advanced companies are actively doing this.

7. Twitter. Twitter is rapidly becoming a major marketing tool that businesses all over the world are getting up to speed with. You can find people interested in your products daily in most niches – and contact them without having to email and possibly be labeled a spammer. Right now Twitter is wide open and people are making money with it. Learn all you can about this social media / marketing resource.

5 Tips for Using Twitter for Your Florida Business

Twitter is one of the new and best tools new online businesses can use to ramp up customer base and sales. Here are some keys to using Twitter like an expert.

Twitter is still widely unregulated, and the potential exists for companies or individuals to start spamming people willy nilly. You could start tweeting about your business to complete strangers and try to get sales the old-fashioned way, by ramming it down people’s throat’s. That’s probably nota good way to go about it.

Here are some smarter ideas about how to use Twitter to market your business:

1. Open your ears more than your beak. Listen much more than you tweet.

Being on Twitter is at first like being lost and finding yourself in a convention where everyone is talking about their own thing but nobody is talking about your thing. Sometimes you can’t connect with people immediately about what you would prefer to connect with them about. So, go with the flow and enter conversations where the topic is about something you know. Make connections with people first, regardless of topics they’re talking about.

One way you can find people that are talking right now about something you want to talk about – your business niche – is to search twitter for specific phrases. The results will be in real-time and show you who was talking about your topic. If you can think of an easy way to start a conversation with those people – give it a shot. Be prepared for people to label you a spammer though.

2. Goal of every tweet? Help someone. I’m talking about when you’re just tweeting out things to those that follow you, not when you’re in a conversation with one or a couple of people that are direct messaging you.

The golden rule of building relationships online is to help someone by giving them some sort of value. Maybe it’s a link to a joke. Maybe it’s a link to a crime that just happened. Maybe it’s an excellent article on the middle east situation. Whatever your followers might be interested in – you should focus on tweets that will help them learn something or accomplish something.

3. Don’t tweet about personal details of your life, like what is on TV, or that you just had breakfast, or that your baby just burped. Nobody – not even you, is interested in those topics. Shoot for something interesting and that might start conversations. You want people to reply to you often.

Ask many questions as you tweet, this is a great way to get responses.

4. Tweet back answers to others questions, and start conversations about something they said. Actively reply to others and get conversations going about topics that are parallel to ones you want to talk about or learn about. Ask more questions about the topic and keep the conversation going.

5. Multimedia tweet. Don’t use just text, but use photos, links to websites, links to videos, link to everything you can – it breaks up the monotony and adds another dimension to twitter.

Twitter is fast becoming a prime way to market your business online and find customers. There are so many millions of people using Twitter that you could spend nearly all your time involved in ways to get them to notice your business. Pay someone with a large following to mention your business in one of their tweets.

When not writing articles to share with the world at EzineArticles the author spends his time evangelizing the incorporation process for new on and offline businesses.

Using Podcasts (Audio) to Market Your Florida Business

Don’t let the word podcast scare you. Reading the word conjures up visions of sound engineers mixing your voice with modern sound effects and controlling 60 variables – none of which you need to worry about at all.

Podcasting is simply recording an audio file to release on your website. Marketing your Florida products or services using podcasts is another good way to reach people with your business message.

Why do podcasts work?

People love multimedia online. Youtube has shown billions of videos already and podcasts have been heard billions of times. The written word – or the typed word as is the case online – is a bit boring. It shows nothing of the person behind the message. Your message is made up of 3 components. Who you are, what you sound like – and the intonation you use… the tone of voice you use… and your message itself. If you’re only writing your message online – you’re missing the personal aspect which can add a lot to your message.

Podcasts are easy to do and easy to edit. I use Windows XP “Movie Maker” software to edit my podcasts.

What microphone do I use? My cell phone. I have a Nokia e71 phone which gives me a voice recorder software program that records brilliant sound – amazing sound, and there’s no need at all to pick up a microphone or digital recorder. However, if your phone is no good – either upgrade your phone or you can pay just over $100 USD for a good quality Sony or other digital voice recorder that have exceptional microphones for voice recording.

For myself – I think my message is most well received when I don’t script out everything I want to say and read it like I’m standing in front of my high school class. Use a natural voice and have an outline ready that reminds you of each topic you want to talk about during the podcast.

When you’re finished you upload the sound file to your computer and you can use “SUPER” or “Audacity” or some other audio conversion program to change the file to just about any valid sound file format that you wish.

Apple has a huge podcast directory – and you can find many more to submit your files to. Put links on your own website with instructions about right clicking the link and choosing “Save file as…” or “Save target as…” and saving the file to the hard drive to listen to later.

Many people like to listen to the audio files on their iPod or similar gadget. Can even use their phones now…

Try some podcasts and see if it works for you!

Using Video to Market Your New Florida Business

One of the clear focuses of online marketing groups in 2009 is encouraging companies to use video to promote their online or offline business.

Why Video?
Video marketing used to be a territory that few small businesses bothered with. The space was dominated by companies with on-staff videographers with expensive Canon GL-2 camcorders and professional lapel microphones hiring easy to look at spokespersons to spread the word about their overpriced products.

Video marketing has changed quite a bit. Anyone with a video camcorder or even a digital camera that offers 640×480 resolution video as a feature can record decent web video to promote their Florida business products and/or services online with a minimum of effort and expense.

Video production companies are invested in spreading the message that “it’s impossible to do quality video on your own without us. You need to pay us x amount of money to create a top quality video marketing message for your Florida business. Without us – you’re lost.”

Here are 6 things video production houses don’t want you to know:

1. Hosting your website with video is not any more expensive than hosting your website without video. Unless you need streaming video – and you don’t, because the rate of transfer for files has reached a point where a viewer isn’t waiting long to download the entire video anyway, you don’t need to pay a lot to host your Florida business website. Look into Bluehost.com, GoDaddy.com – two of the easiest, cheapest, and best places to find web hosting for your business at VERY affordable rates.

2. Camcorder quality must be mini dv 3-Chip in order to be any good for online web video. Wrong. As I said, a simple sony cybershot that provides 640×480 video resolution can work just fine with a tripod, good lighting and sound. A 3-CCD chip camera can record cinema quality movies that will be shown on a 20-foot screen, not a 320×240 square one foot away from your customer’s face on the computer screen.

3. Final Cut Pro or some other ultra-expensive video editing software is required to edit your videos to the point where they are professional enough for public viewing. Wrong. Even Microsoft Windows free “Movie Maker” can be used in most cases. We use no expensive editing software for editing our Florida incorporation videos on this site.

4. Videos must be compatible with other platforms and on many different sites. Truth is they already are. If you create a Windows Movie Maker file – in .wmv format, you can upload that to YouTube – where they convert it to flash for you – and it’s compatible with almost every visitor’s computer that visits YouTube. Likewise with MPG or any of the other major formats.

5. Marketing your video will be extremely expensive! Wrong. If you just put your video on YouTube and some of the other free video websites and provide some links to them from your Florida business website then people will find them and you’ll gain customers. Optimization of your description of the video on YouTube is of key importance, but it’s not brain surgery.

6. It’s difficult to create your own Florida business videos. Wrong. It’s not that difficult. In a week of research and trying and practicing, you can create better quality videos than 80% of what is on YouTube today. Most people don’t even pay attention to lighting. Professional bloggers don’t even light their videos correctly. 99% of all videos on Youtube are not done by professionals. They aren’t done correctly either.

You can create great looking videos for your Florida products or Florida services by researching basic video instructions and practicing for a week. You CAN do it on your own and market your Florida business with online video – either on your site, on YouTube, or both. Learning to create your own business video is a skill that will help your business grow over it’s lifetime.

START LEARNING TODAY!