Adding Ajax functionality to your WordPress blog can improve its performance, take fewer resources, speed up page loads, and let your users do things that out-of-the-box WordPress will not do.

An article called How to Ajaxify Your WordPress Site by Jeff Star on ProBlogger.net details some of the things Ajax WordPress plugins can do for you. As Jeff says,

Beyond the “coolness” factor, Ajax can also improve the responsiveness and performance of your site. Instead of loading new pages to leave comments, view posts, and share content, Ajax empowers users to interact with your site with greater intimacy and efficiency than ever before. By eliminating page loads, Ajax helps to save valuable server resources and bandwidth, resulting in improved performance for your site. And you can “ajaxify” just about anything: from logins and comments to navigation and updates, Ajax can speed things up, save resources, and make your site better than ever.

The article discusses numerous Ajax plugins for functions like faster logins, slicker commenting, and better navigation.

Resources:
How to Ajaxify Your WordPress Site
Digging Into WordPress

If you are an online entrepreneur or any kind of entrepreneur for that matter (offline, bricks and mortar, professional, whatever) you may have wondered if you should start a blog.

I’m not going to enumerate the pros and cons of blogging. Instead I want to suggest what an effective business-oriented blog is, and the attitude you should have when you consider creating one. This may help you decide if you should put in the effort to create a business blog.

Business Blogging is Marketing

For our purposes here I am using the term “business” in a fairly broad sense. As I see it when you start engaging in activities for some organized or focused ulterior motive you are engaging in a “business”.

If you have a shoe store, for example, you generally are not selling shoes because you enjoy it. Selling shoes is not like going to the gym, reading a good book, or watching a baseball game on TV. Selling shoes has a point – to make money, earn a living, or whatever else you want to call it.

So first, not to sound too dogmatic about this, people in business have blogs for some marketing objective – they have a “focused ulterior motive” – to “sell” a message.

That doesn’t mean your business blog has to continually hawk products or talk about special deals for your services. But it does mean that it should reflect your business objectives and offer relevant information to your primary target market – your customers and prospective customers.

Sometimes the “marketing” objective of a blog is not very obvious. To take a fairly extreme example, let’s say you are a writer or a “commentator” type – you know, the kind of person who likes to express opinions, “rant”, or just hear him or herself talk.

In that case having a blog gives you a platform for getting out your message and enhancing your professional persona. It doesn’t have to be your only soapbox – you may also want to post videos on Youtube or start a radio program on BlogTalkRadio. But a blog can be the focal point of your empire – the thing that ties it all together and helps you establish a consistent presence.

In other words, business blogging is about marketing. Which means you should figure out your business objectives before starting a business blog. And then fit your blog into those objectives.

Business Blogging is about Publishing

Second, business bloggers should view themselves as publishers. The distinctive thing about “publishing” as opposed to just writing stuff, is that it is done in an organized and focused way with the intention of appealing to specific readers.

Unlike a diary, or even a traditional blog (which is sort of like a diary) you are not primarily writing for yourself in a business blog. A diary is specifically meant not to be read by others. A business blog is the opposite. A primary objective is to give as many readers as possible something interesting to read, watch or listen to.

There is a parallel here with book publishing. Traditional publishers will only publish a book if they think it has a chance of recouping costs and (hopefully) making a profit. When you submit a written work to a traditional publisher you are subjecting your work to the evaluation of a somewhat detached third party. Their primary concern is not to spread your message, but rather to sell your book in order to stay in business.

On the other hand, when you self-publish you pay the costs up front and are not willing to accept some third party’s opinion of the marketability of your writing. This is often called the vanity press because people who self-publish are prepared to pay to have works printed that have no hope of making a traditional publisher any money.

Blogs have been compared to the vanity press because they are self-published, have virtually no cost of entry, and often have no chance of getting a lot of readers.

But business blogs – at least as I have described them here – are more akin to traditional publishing. You should not waste your time and effort on a business blog if it has no chance of giving you some kind of return.

In other words, as a publisher you should be prepared to do what it takes to make your business blog a worthwhile investment. First, that means evaluating your target market and coming up with a game plan. Second, it means creating content that has a chance of getting readers. And third it means promoting your blog because you recognize that without readers you are basically wasting your time and the resources of your business.

Building links is an important part of promoting your website(s) and building an online presence. The more you get involved in different places around the web the more you will be noticed and the more traffic you will ultimately get. This is what you might call the “Prolific Principle”. The more prolific you are, the more your “presence” will grow.

This applies to content – publish as much fresh, original content as you can – and it applies to links pointing to your web properties. Be prolific – get out there – a lot.

In an article published a couple years ago on the HubSpot Blog Peter Caputa compares the link building process to passing through the “grades” you go through in high school. The article is called Did You Graduate From Link Building High School Yet?

Peter suggests to really master this process will take 4 years (like it does in high school), and that you have to move through the stages gradually. I think this is probably an exaggeration. If you get good advice you should be able to move through the stages quite a bit more quickly than that, and I believe the stages overlap more than he suggests. Nevertheless, the article makes some good suggestions. Here is my summary with comments of my own…

In Stage 1 (Grade 9) you should build links that don’t require anyone else’s help. These links include directory listings, many of which you can get for free, and references on social media sites where (among other things) you can create a profile – also for free.

I would add to this you should try to get at least one or two links from established sites that will result in your site being indexed as quickly as possible – perhaps from a friend or colleague. If you own a local business look for local business directories. Not only can you get listed there, but you can find other people you might exchange links with.

In Stage 2 (Grade 10) you should launch a business blog and begin adding content on a regular basis. Then start publishing articles on sites like Ezinearticles.com, GoArticles.com and others. You can use a submission service like SubmitYourArticle.com for distribution to a large number of sites.

As I outline in a previous post about article marketing this is a good way to get links (by adding them to your “resource box” on each article) and to build a reputation as an “expert” in your field. Of course this requires writing original, interesting articles. If you are stumped for original content you can just do reviews of other people’s articles or products (like this article) or you might consider using an article writing service like Textbrokers.

In Stage 3 (Grade 11) you should start networking with as many people as possible who share your interests. The object is to make yourself visible. This requires participation and “engagement”.

One way of doing this is to find a number of bloggers in your niche and start making meaningful comments on their posts. This is called blog commenting.

This will gradually introduce you to fellow bloggers and your link in each comment will attract a small amount of traffic from other commenters or readers. Once you gain enough confidence you can approach some of the bloggers you have met this way to do a guest post on their blog. That way you can leverage their readership to enhance your own visibility.

By this stage your blog should have a fair bit of valuable content so you should register it with as many blog networks as possible. MyBlogLog.com is a good place to start. This will help you meet other bloggers with similar interests and will give you some tools for tracking your traffic as it gradually grows.

You can also use other social media to gain visibility for specific blog posts. Digg and Stumbleupon are good places to start. You can also post references (and links) to specific blog posts on your Facebook wall, Twitter, and wherever else is appropriate.

Remember, the objective here is to build connections with key people and use the connections to build visibility. Content is the key. Build content on your blogs, in articles, and with guest posts.

In Stage 4 (Grade 12) you become a power blogger creating all kinds of content: articles, training courses, white papers, webinars and videos. All of these things attract readers, links, and subscribers. If you have done it correctly you should be an important, highly visible part of a vibrant community, and you should be at the top of the search engine results for your most important keywords.

If you’re a blogger or blogger wannabe there’s a informative post by Ann Smarty about guest blogging at SearchEngineJournal.com that you should take a look at.

Guest blogging is a win-win situation. It provides already established bloggers with new, original (presumably well written) content. And it gives the guest blogger a platform to reach a lot of people he or she otherwise would probably not reach.

In another blog post from July 2010 Jeremy Bencken offers some suggestions for developing an effective guest blogging strategy. He suggests you should ask yourself three questions when getting involved in guest blogging:

1. What audience do you want to reach?
2. What’s your goal?
3. Is your content truly great?

The most important point is that guest blogging should be aimed not at building links but at building your profile and establishing your own blog as an authority. That means, first and foremost, writing good content that your target market will be interested in. Then find the blogs that help you target those people most effectively.

guest blogging, writing, link building, branding, blogs, blog strategy

April 20, 2010 – A “hyperlocal” blog is one that focuses on one or more specific neighbourhoods within a region. In a hyperlocal blog you publish material of specific interest to people in those neighbourhoods. We refer to these neighbourhoods as “communities”.

Why specific communities? Why “hyper” local? One reason for this is to gain search engine traction for those specific communities. Keywords such as “Lakeshore Village Kingston” are much less competitive than “Kingston”.

But this is really a secondary reason for focusing on the smaller community. The truth is you will get very little search engine traffic from hyperlocal keywords, even if you dominate them in the search results. As I have said in many other places, relying on SEO to get local blog traffic is both frustrating and disappointing and it is doomed to failure.

The far more important reason is to focus on hyperlocal communities is to become a resource for the people of the community – to become an online destination for people interested in reading about or seeing photos and videos featuring people and events in their community.

And, of course, in the process you build your own profile as someone active in the community.

What is a “community”?

In the case of real estate blogs a “community” within a city will usually be a subdivision or neighbourhood. If you are a real estate agent you know exactly what I’m talking about.

In a rural area like I live in, my township (Woolwich, Ontario) has a fairly strong identity, but most people in the township more closely identify with the specific village or town they live in. So the communities one would focus on with a “hyperlocal blog” about Woolwich township would be villages such as Conestogo, St. Jacobs, Breslau, Bloomingdale, Linwood, Elmira, etc.

What does a hyperlocal blog look like?

Some real estate agents active in hyperlocal blogging feel it is best to create a separate blog for each community or neighbourhood they service. For an example and discussion of this approach see the series by Matt McGee called Starting a Hyperlocal Blog: The Series.

Frankly, this seems like overkill to me. As long as you have clearly identified sections within your blog for each local community you service you will accomplish your goal.

In fact I would say it would be much easier to manage if you had just one blog dedicated to the city or area of the city you want to focus on, and then sections within that blog for each “community”.

In WordPress you can manage this by creating categories for each community, and/or a separate “page” for each community with links to the appropriate posts.

Content is what matters

Regardless of how you approach the organization of your hyperlocal blog it is absolutely essential to remember that this exercise is not about impressing the search engines. If that works, then fine. It is much much much more important to publish items that will interest the people in your communities.

Photographs are the easiest – Take a few hours and drive through your communities taking photographs of interesting buildings, schools, churches, playgrounds, community centers.

Take off your real estate agent hat for a few hours and think of yourself as a photographer or reporter. Shoot some pictures from interesting angles.

Then run some simple little contests – possibly one a week for each community – “Identify this building/person/tree/bird house/window/etc. and win a prize”. Get a local coffee shop or restaurant to donate some $5 gift certificates, or if they won’t donate them, buy them.

Be sure to run your contests on the level. Plan them carefully, make sure the winners are selected in a fair way, and be sure to award the prizes as you said you would. Ask the winners for a photo of themselves and publish them along with the names of the winners each week.

The whole point is to get people involved and show your face in the communities to a broader audience. You want to get people coming to your blog and participating.

This is just one idea among many that others have successfully used. If you have any suggestions, please leave a comment.

April 18, 2010 – There’s an interesting article in today’s Financial Post about the morphing of blogs from amateur and “personalized” to commercial and professional. The three blogs featured in this article are crushable.com, thegloss.com and blisstree.com – all aimed at young women “fixated on sassy information about celebrities, fashion, health and well-being.”

Together they pull in more than 3 million viewers a month. They have discoverd that the old off-the-cuff, amateur, personalized model of blogging was not translatable into commercial success – mainly because the quality of the writing in amateur blogs is generally poor and it is impossible to build reader loyalty with that type of content.

If that is the case, how can a part time blogging real estate agent, or local business person compete for viewers? The answer is pretty obvious once you get past the experimentation stage…

1. Don’t try to compete with the big boys. Unless you want to go into the publishing business you don’t need 3 million viewers from all across the continent. Learn from them, but don’t try to compete with them.

2. Focus on specialization. Don’t try to be all things to all people. Concentrate on providing quality content for one (or maybe two or three) narrow niches.

3. Focus on hyperlocal content. This is something a large publication or blog can never adequately cover. Publish local features about local events, places of interest, people, schools, libraries, churches, sports teams, companies, and so on.

4. Make your writing as interesting, competent, professional as you can without making it tedious. Give your content character – your own character.

Having a blog is just another way to get involved in social networking. But a good blog is more than that. It should be at the core of your social marketing strategy. It is where you can define yourself and your business in the terms you choose.

You need an objective for your blog, and I think the best one is to:
“Promote Your Corporate Brand”. Not just to promote your brand, but to actually fashion it the way you want it.

Of course promoting your brand will also include introducing, explaining and promoting your products and services. But most good blogs are not just a series of ads for the company. They present interesting and helpful information.

“Promoting Your Corporate Brand” is a fancy way of saying use your blog to give your business a distinctive personality – what used to be called your “image”.

First, consider how you would like your public (customers, contacts, prospects, site visitors, etc.) to think about you. For example, if you’re a real estate agent do you want people to think of you as

- the friendly guy
- the helpful guy
- the knowledgeable guy
- the smart guy
- the reliable guy
- the experienced guy

Do you want to reflect your area of specialization in what you do? For example, if you’re an internet marketer or online entrepreneur do you have a clearly defined area of specialization? Are you

- the blogging girl
- the video girl
- the affiliate sales guru
- the list building expert
- the link building professional
- the SEO guy
- the creative web designer
- the clever copywriter

Whatever you choose, this should always (or almost always) be reflected somehow in all your blog posts. Each of your posts should clearly say “This is the voice of experience speaking when it comes to commercial real estate” or “Our web design is not only creative, but it will give you an edge when it comes to convincing people they should deal with you” or “I will work my tail off to make sure I get the best price for your home.”

Often the decision about the character or personality of your business has already been made for you. It is usually a reflection of your personal character and is simply the way you conduct your business.

But don’t assume your people know this. Make it explicit in how you promote yourself. In other words, turn your persona into a “brand”. Because of the personal nature of blogging, that makes your blog the perfect place to refine and promote your brand.

Copyright Linknet Promotions

The other day I followed a link in one of the many internet marketing pitches I seem to receive on a daily basis. It offered me yet another reason why I should join a “fantastic new membership site” that would show me how I could get tons of traffic to my blog.

The pitch was in the form of a blog post and the claim was that if I received less than 1000 visitors a day and 300 subscribers then I obviously needed help. One of the topics was “How to write posts that get comments.”

I had a closer look at the blog and I noticed that the very post that I was reading had only two comments.

So how could this be? If this person is using her own strategy she should be getting at least 1000 visits to her blog every day. If she is applying her own strategies for generating comments how could a post have only two comments? Shouldn’t this post have hundreds of comments? It doesn’t make sense, does it?

Well, yes it does. Because she was obviously bending the truth. The 1000 visitors a day was just another figment of the fertile imagination of a “successful” internet marketer.

That single article entirely changed my attitude to this blogger. She could no longer be trusted. She was just another exaggerating, truth-stretching internet marketer.

Rules 1 and 2 – Be Truthful

If you are considering creating a personal or corporate blog you should give some thought to developing your own “code of ethics”. I’m not big on strict formal rules, but there is definitely a place for knowing what ethical principles you think are important. Here’s a start:

Rule #1 – Always tell the truth

Rule #2 – Don’t exaggerate your product claims (See Rule #1).

These two rules are a great place to start. The fact is your blog will (or should) become your voice, your channel, and to a large degree the shaper of your identity. So it is important that you think about how you intend to conduct yourself.

As with all channels of communication your first commitment should be to honesty and sincerity. That means there is very little room for exaggeration and misrepresentation – no matter how badly you want to sell your products.

Rules 3 and 4 – Don’t Copy Material Without Permission

The third and fourth rules have to do with creating content and using material provided (or previously published) by others.

Rule #3 – Don’t Use Published Material Without Permission

Rule #4 – Give Credit to the Author when Re-Publishing Material

Generally speaking, content created by other authors should not be copied or reproduced unless it specifically says you can do so. That goes for newspaper or magazine articles, and posts from other blogs.

Two good examples where you do not have to ask for permission (because it is assumed) are the use of articles from article directories, and the embedding of videos from sites like Youtube.

In these cases the creators of this content are making it available for republishing because they want increased exposure. That means you must give them credit as the author (and not act as though you created it), you must not change the content, and you must leave embedded links in place as they were put there by the author.

Rule 5 – Spread the Links Around

When blogs first broke on the scene one of their primary purposes was for bloggers to share links to content they found interesting. That way bloggers could create a rich web of interlinked resources. So this leads us to,

Rule #5 – Link to External Sources

This practice not only honours your sources, but also is advantageous to you. When you link to other bloggers or websites, or when you link back to resources you refer to in your own posts, you are identifying yourself with a larger community of bloggers.

Not only does this help generate traffic (for the blogs you link to), but it helps to generate inbound links from other bloggers (who return the favor), and it improves your standing in Google because you become associated with the other blogs you are inter-linked with.

Copyright Linknet Promotions

Get this Free Report about creating a successful blog.

You’ve probably heard that you should consider starting a blog. The purpose of a blog is to create interesting content to build a following of regular readers.

Real Estate Agents can use a blog to create an identity, reinforce their expertise and stay in touch with clients and prospects.

But the truth is, most blogs do not work. No matter how good the content is, if it isn’t promoted properly it is basically a waste of time and energy.

This report offers tips on how to come up with interesting things to write about. But much more importantly it provides a common sense way to get targeted traffic to your blog.

Without traffic a blog is pointless. This report describes how to create a blog that your most important people will read.

AgentMapIt members can download Blogs That Work from the members area.

Non-members can sign up for the report here.