If you’re a business owner like me, you may have heard people tell you that you should be blogging. This is probably met with some healthy skepticism on your part, since blogging is for geeks, right? At first I thought the same thing. After all, I thought, I have a Web site. Why should I bother doing a blog? Who reads those blogs anyway?

The truth is that blogging is probably one of the most highly influential activities you can undertake to help your business. Best of all, it’s 100% free marketing once you set it up. Personally, I love “free”. …

It can be difficult to get a new blog off the ground.  A recent IBM report announced that 80% of the blogs they host never made it past the 5th post.  Other blogs, especially business blogs, often start with a flurry of activity only to peter off after a month or two.

If you want to keep your online presence from becoming one of these social media casualties, you need plan out how you will keep your blog alive.

Build Blogging into Your Calendar

When it comes to scheduling, you need to treat your blog just like you would any other formal project.  …

Purpose

At their heart Facebook, Forums, and Blogs are all about communication and community, but each focuses on a different area of where those to concepts intersect.

Forums: The main purpose of a forum is to create a sense of community.  Most forums require participants to become members.  Members are then allowed to participate in ongoing conversations and create new conversations of their own  In addition, most forums include some means of direct, private, unmonitored communication to foster direct communication among the members (and to company representatives).

Blogs: The main purpose of a blog is to serve as a …

March is National March into Literacy Month and worthy of our support.

But let’s also celebrate children’s literacy by remembering those books that delighted us when we were kids. What was your favorite? Perhaps it was a classic such as Charlotte’s Web or Huck Finn, or one the many books by Maurice Sendak or Madeleine L’Engle. Or did you enjoy reading about the Hardy Boys or the Little House on the Prairie? Whatever you read then (or read now), reading developed your use of spoken and written language.

Maybe your favorite “children’s”  book is of more recent vintage! I recall riding …

Blog

Web Log.  A blog is a website maintained by an individual or group that is characterized by a persistent record of old content and the regular addition of new content.  A typical blog will present these entries in reverse chronological order.

Blogroll

A list of recommended blogs that is typically displayed in a persistent sidebar

Blogosphere

The whole of the blogging world, including all blogs and those who write them

Embedding

Placing a pre-written piece of code into your blog or website so that you can display a video, widget, banner, or content block created by someone else.  …

Every group, every profession, even every family has its own special words: Lingo. When you prepare marketing materials, email, print brochures and newsletters, web content, be sure you’re communicating in a language that the uninitiated will understand.

What do I mean by uninitiated? When I was becoming a fan of baseball, I was flummoxed by lingo such as Texas-league single, dinger, blooper, the other way, southpaw, and frozen rope. The more I learned about the game (initiated into its finer points by my college pal Jack, baseball’s biggest fan), the more fluent I became in baseball-ese.

Your business uses particular terms:  You …

Want to know what a blog really spends time talking about?  Wordle.net provides a fun, visually appealing, and easy to understand way to do just that.

Just type the URL for a blog into the appropriate field and Wordle will create a “Word Cloud” just for you.  Wordle looks through the most recent blog posts, and the more often a word is used, the larger it appears in the cloud.

Here’s what the recent Gold Mine posts look like: