If you want your blog to gain active readers, it won’t happen without some skills.

The following are seven ways to beef up your blog posts:

Tip #1: Speak to Your Audience

The reason you blog must be determined in order to add content that will work for you. You should become well acquainted with your target audience and their profile, as well as your main message and how it relates to your company. Knowing your reader makes writing to them much easier. This also means that your posts will have meaning and be directed to the right audience. You won’t be wandering off-topic and covering topics that do not concern your readers.

Tip #2: Be Aware Your Reader’s Wants

Always keep in mind what your reader wants when writing. Let them know what they will walk away with from reading your blog. Why does it matter to them? Readers constantly evaluate a blog and decide whether or not it’s worth their time to keep reading. Putting yourself in their position increases your chances of keeping them interested. Bring up serious problems and other events important to them. If you aren’t sure what those are, simply ask and find out.

Tip #3: Frequent Editing

There are tons of blog entries that open up with, “I had this great idea yesterday…” or “As Winter comes to an end…”. People often make the mistake of treating a blog like an essay or other literary work. But they are not. You should waste no time in getting your main idea across. Use the helpful acronym of KISS = Keep It Short and Sweet. It will end up meaning less writing is required of you.

Write using brief and strong phrases, leaving out words that you can do without. Do this by reviewing posts more than once before publishing them. It isn’t necessary to have any formal education in writing. Writing an email is as simple as writing a blog post. But just like emails, your posts will become better if you go over them before they are published.

Read it through one more time following publication. Sometimes this is useful for noticing small grammatical mistakes and other typos that slipped by. Many readers will place a good deal of importance on correct spelling, so make sure you fix any errors you find. Online, text is all that represents you.

Tip #4: Titles with Keywords are the Key

Write headlines full of carefully placed keywords that relate to your topic. Keywords are held in the highest regard of SEO experts who charge hefty sums for their services. But let’s simplify this area.

Imagine you are your reader. If you are using Google to find information or answers to a question, would you find your blog? Compile a list of all words and phrases that may be entered into a search engine when looking for your business and the things you offer. Those items are the words and phrases you should litter your site with. When creating headlines, use these often. This highlights what is important about your post, both to readers as well as search engines.

Staying up to date on keywords will help you stay in touch with what your potential customers would like. By doing a little research on occasion, you can discover how readers are locating the information you specialize in. Use descriptive headlines. Don’t keep them general. Keep them cute without going overboard, but just be sure to include the topic of your writing and make sure it clearly lets the reader know what is discussed.

Remember, this is centered around your audience. The idea is to guide them with the content you provide. Blogging will do you little to no good at all if your readers are not getting what they’re looking for out of reading your blog.

Tip #5: Start Off With Strong Opening Sentences

Using the keywords from your posts headline, compose the first paragraph. State your message clearly and right away, rather than writing an introduction for it. Your first sentence should be keyword rich, and should be reused again to wrap up your post. Always include an invitation to leave feedback at the end of each post.

Tip #6: Keep it Brief and Space it Out

When blogging, paragraphs should never drone on. Instead, keep them limited to a couple sentences and then break for the next. In some cases, a single sentence can convey as much as an entire paragraph. White space is good, use it generously between your blog post paragraphs.

Don’t forget that many readers are pressed for time. It’s not as easy to read text on a computer screen as it is to read text on paper. Your goal should be to communicate your message in a timely manner, making it as easy for your readers as possible.

Tip #7: Apply Bullets and Other Formatting to Your Lists

Lists and bullet points should be put to frequent use. A few reasons they add convenience to your post are:

Easier Reading
Easier to skim
Easier to comprehend
Easier to retain

According to research, people like things to be easily absorbed and broken into parts for them. Formatting your message into a list of 3-5 items makes them more likely to recall it later. Online writing professionals suggest keeping lists to an odd number of bullet points, but the biggest emphasis should be on using lists whenever possible.

There are several methods for strengthening your blog posts. These seven tips are a good start in the right direction and can be used as a checklist to keep you on track and supplying content that will interest and motivate your readers.

What other suggestions should be added to this list in order to improve blog posts? Share your favorite blogging tips in the comments below.

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The line of experts on social media is endless these days. While many assert that there is no such thing as a “social media expert” one thing is clear — they all are giving out advice on the ways that it works, the ways it doesn’t and the correct protocol for using it.

A great deal of these statements are regarded as being absolutely true and effective for any business that sets out to use social media. Such experts give this type of advice based on experience which is mostly their own and doesn’t account for the circumstances of the non-expert. There is a good chance that their instructions will not be helpful to you. Even if someone is only doing their best to point you in the right direction, they may end up leading you way off the track for YOUR business.

It’s important to have respect for experience and seniority, but when suggestions become set in stone, it becomes necessary to question them.

The following list includes some buzz phrases that are being passed off as “rules”. Each one should be evaluated on an individual basis when starting to work towards your social media marketing goals.

Claim 1: The Social Media Revolution Effects EVERYTHING

This is quite frankly nonsense. It has given us some exciting and innovative resources and given customers a louder voice to express their opinions on products and services. This is all true. But potential clients must still be sought after, sales still have to be closed and billing departments still need to prepare and send out invoices. All of these things are still as essential to a business’ longevity as they ever were.

Another fact to keep in mind is that networking has been around far longer than LinkedIn. Before these kinds of sites existed, networking took place in person. Was it so bad back then when it meant social events complete with refreshments and good company? I don’t think so.

“How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie, could be considered among the best publications on the topic of social media marketing, despite the fact it was written before such a concept had been formed. I urge you to read it or revisit it if you already have, because all that is covered within it remains valid to this day. The only difference now is that it is taking place on sites like Twitter.

Claim 2: Social Media is Useless for Boosting Sales

The above claim is often a sentiment held onto by those who were pioneers and who reflect on “better times” for social media, before ads invaded Facebook and spammers exploited it.

It’s indisputable that Dell has generated millions of dollars in sales of PC’s and accessories through Twitter deals. Smaller and more local businesses like cafes and coffee shops have used Twitter to take customer orders that are ready for pick-up upon their arrival. They’ve also found opportunities to use location-specific applications like FourSquare and Gowalla.

None of this should be taken as encouragement for sending out spam to all the people you possibly can through social media. That will only work against you, and may even result in account termination on more widely-used sites. The idea behind this and the goal is to deliver a meaningful message to someone it will have meaning to, because this will make sales happen.

Claim 3: Straying from Your Message is Prohibited

Some of the most successful social media gurus of today will oftentimes swear by this. When you think of the type of people who constantly keep to one message, who comes to mind? Politicians and inhuman corporations. Unless you fall into one of those categories, it isn’t your best option.
Don’t be afraid to express yourself or make comments on your personal life. No single subject has to totally dominate all your discussions, but you shouldn’t stray too far from whatever you are trying to represent. You can’t expect to attract many leads if ALL you talk about is your favorite TV show or what you had for lunch, after all.

Your mundane daily tasks and thoughts may not be the most effective way to capture anyones interest, but including a balanced mixture of topics that add personality can and will. Maybe you enjoy jogging, flea market shopping, working on cars, but what matters is that by sharing these things you will appeal more to others with common interests and this will fortify your network.

To quote Chris Garrett’s blogpost titled “How to Boost Your Personal Brand with Social Media”:

“Using light humor, being kind, sharing about more than just your work — including your interests — allow people to connect with you on a human level as well as a business and technical level.”

Claim 4: Social Media is Useless Without a Massive Following

Among my own network, we’ve exchanged and discussed the types of expert advice that we disagree with. The emphasis placed on establishing a huge following is the most commonly mentioned.

If a so-called expert is relating social media using numbers, they likely fall into one of two different groups. Either they claim to be a “guru” of social media and have offers in their bio which promise to teach you special knowledge that is guaranteed to gain followers by the hundreds on a daily basis, yet oddly he can’t boast more than 19 followers himself.

The other is the more legitimate social media marketer who lives and breaths the ideas behind it and takes it seriously because their type of business needs a large list of clients in order to thrive. For this type of person, it makes sense to think in terms of numbers.

There is something to be said for this suggestion, however. It is true that you reach a greater number of people if you accumulate a target network. Naturally, your response rate will depend mostly on how many followers your questions go out to.

Oftentimes we see that a user has thousands of followers and we figure anything they recommend has to be trustworthy. If we see someone getting tons of comments on their blog, it becomes validation in our minds and we make a big assumption that they’re madly successful.

Quite honestly, the number is not what really matters. The value of having even 100 followers who actively read your posts and contribute to the conversation is far greater than having thousands of readers who are never attentive.

It’s a common practice for people to devote a day to finding as many new people as they can find, then removing them a day later if they aren’t followed back in return. Realistically, you can only expect so much attention from your followers if they are reading posts from 20,000 other users. How well do you think you will stand out?

On the other side of that, if you follow thousands of people you can’t expect to have time for individually responding to them either.

Claim 5: You Need Oodles of Comments

Undoubtedly, inspiring others to leave comments makes the writer feel proud of what they’ve written. Recognition is great when you’ve put considerable work into something.

However, the fact of the matter is that comments are not customers. Aside from boosting your confidence, they get you no closer to your actual goal. Putting too much importance on comments can actually hurt your business instead of help it. I know of some businesses who gave up on blogging altogether simply due to a lack of comments. That equals no new posts, which in turn equals less exposure that would have led to more online leads.

If your business plan is all about a high volume of comments, blog about popular topics that spark controversy. Politics, religion, or reality TV shows are some good choices if you’re seeking a high comment count. But if expanding your business is more your concern, you should really pay more attention to your blog’s search engine ranking and how many warm leads it sends to your site.

Claim 6: You Can’t Account for How Much Profit Social Media Generates

The truth is you can. It’s easy to find statistics that do NOT relate to profit. Some popular examples are the number of views for a YouTube video, the subscriber count for your podcast, or even the popularity of your blog according to Del.icio.us. Other types of social media sites also make certain numbers very accessible, like how many followers you have on Twitter or friends you have on Facebook, even how many times your blog post has been “dugg”. (Just do well to remember that not all followers and friends will be equally important and it’s not a race for numbers alone).

Apart from statistics like these, there are also numbers related to sales. Traffic sent to your site by social media and blogs, and how many visitors end up doing business with you are some of the most important. If you ask your visitors to list a referrer in your contact form somewhere, you could begin to see more responses from Twitter followers or search engine results.

Claim 7: Facebook and Twitter are Your Only Choices

There is a single valid explanation for where you choose to engage in social media: your target audience uses the site.

The best social media avenue will not be the same for all businesses. If you’re unsure which platform is right for your company, go with the one most used by your target audience.

I still urge you to register your username on every social media site you can find, for two crucial reasons:

1. No one else can register that name, which will give security to your brand.

2. Even for brand new startups that haven’t been noticed yet, you never know when it may become more widely-used by an audience your business is relevant to.

Never forget to individually evaluate what is right for your business. You may be given advice that has been tested and proven, but bear in mind that it was someone else it worked for.

The only exception is…

One Rule That Works For Everyone

Offer content worth something. It’s that simple. Social Media makes it as easy to lose subscribers and followers as it does gain them. People will lose interest quickly unless your content has value. Every message, tweet, update, post, video or other communication to your audience should matter to them.

If you ask more than one or two people what makes something valuable, you’re bound to get several different answers. Maybe your value comes from blogging about thought-provoking topics, or collecting and publishing links to other useful resources online. Or even your witty and entertaining opinion on a city where your target audience resides. It doesn’t matter what topic you cover, just make sure you are covering it well and your contribution is worth people’s time.

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Perhaps the biggest argument against social media is how time consuming it can be.

Can you relate to questions like these: “Who has that kind of time?” or “When am I supposed to do all of this?”

To be totally honest with you, social media does require some of your time. It may very well qualify as being the greatest of hidden costs when promoting your business online. Many of us could end up losing a lot of valuable time if we don’t exercise some care.

It’s good to have a clear agenda when setting out, and to keep close tabs on how your time is being spent. The following list will give you five ideas on how to work towards your goals.

#1: Keep Your Goals In Sight

Social Media is full of opportunities to become distracted. Chatting, games, and endless content can all give us the illusion of accomplishment without actually getting anything done. Interacting with social media can be useful, but much interaction is potentially a waste of time, so it’s important that you are able to tell the difference.

For a point of reference, try to imagine a company party or other event. How do you spend your time at those sorts of functions? Do you socialize with one or two people about mundane things or do you try to distribute your attention more evenly and strike up conversation with new contacts? Are you there because you have nothing better to do, or is it because you are representing yourself as a professional and utilizing the opportunity to network?

It’s necessary to have a plan and also know a good means by which to measure your success.

You might be wondering how this helps you find extra time? The majority of companies already budget their time spent on marketing, PR and research. If you are confident that your efforts spent on social media fall into one of these groupings, and will be equally or more effective than other efforts towards these projects, then you actually already have a grasp on how to divide up the time you should spend using social media as an alternative to your current methods.

#2: Use Social Media in Areas Where it is More Efficient for You

What if you could say, “Due to the work I’ve invested in social media, I have eliminated having to make pitches, compose proposals or attend sales meetings. I never place cold-calls for my business, nor do I bother with competitive bids.”

Think about all the time you would suddenly end up with if you were spared having to pursue leads and sales closings!

My last job in Sports Marketing would sometimes require me to be in a car for three to six hours in order to attend a half hour sales presentation up against other companies competing against us. Even more important than how unbearable it was, it simply did not work very well.

Realistically, I am not trying to convince you that it’s possible to use social media as a replacement for your current business practices in all circumstances. I don’t believe it’s a smart choice to rely solely upon it, even if it could be done. What I do believe is that it will be worth your time to set aside a couple hours each work week to explore what social media has to offer and test it out. You will find that it may be a great tool in combination with other techniques, and can work smoothly within a greater business model.

A great benefit of social media is the accessibility of it and freedom of choosing when to use it.

#3: Take Advantage of Slow Times

Do you spend a good amount of time simply waiting? I recently attended a conference in Nashville and between travel time and staying alone at my hotel, I put it all towards social media. If you travel for business, how much of each trip do you spend actually doing business? Now, how much of the time are you…

On a plane?
In a cab?
Waiting in line?
In an airport?
Dining out?
Meetings?
At a hotel?

As long as you are equipped with a device that you can connect to the internet through, you have all that is needed to turn some of this down time into something somewhat productive, like adding an update or interacting with people online. Even if you don’t get as much done, staying connected to others will be refreshing.

Ask yourself how much time goes into checking your messages and posting a tweet or status update? Or maybe to investigate a link or answer a simple inquiry? It’s no more than a few minutes, is it?

You will be surprised if you take an inventory throughout the day of how often you get as much as 10 minutes at a time where you are on hold for some reason.

When I’m at my desk, I still oftentimes am waiting, whether it’s for the PC to boot up, a print job, renders or uploaded files. Those are some of the best moments to take a peek at your social media profiles!

Thinking in these terms, what could be accomplished with MORE than only these few minutes a day?

#4: Change Your Surroundings, Create Future Content and Focus on Structure

Whenever you find yourself with an open block of time, spend an hour of that time expending your maximum level of effort on generating content. Some great ways of doing this could include:

Creating an outline and compose a series of blog topic entries to post at a later date when you won’t have the time to write them.

Experiment with your ideas, visualize them with mind mapping tools, form headlines and lay it all out in a way that you can later reference.

Think ahead by adding important events to your calendar, make a list of contacts who you would like to touch base with, whether they are prospective contacts or ones you’ve fallen out of touch with.

Organize and increase efficiency for the next week by sorting tasks and filing messages.

Make a week’s worth of tweets that will spark interest, which will mean only having to check in and respond every day.

One of my friends in Georgia visits an internet cafe a couple times each week for a change of “scenery”. On these visits he spends a few distraction-free hours doing all of his scheduling and content creation for the following week. Sometimes an environment outside of the office allows for more concentration and you will end up with higher quality work in a relatively short period of time.

#5: Try Not to Stress Out

The last point I will make is that none of this should feel like a chore. No one will penalize you or judge how well you are doing. The idea behind it all is to make use of a great resource and ideally to enjoy yourself while you accomplish this.

Luckily, most people will not demand perfection if you are sure to offer your best assistance, and if you’ve built a strong reputation by providing great value. With these things all in place, you will have some room for mistakes.

Don’t panic if you haven’t posted an article on any given day. Your followers on Twitter may begin to wonder if you disappear for several days at a time, but being too busy to tweet on some days will hardly cost you anything.

Personally, I use social media in a very social fashion. It takes the place of a coffee break in my day. While I do manage to use social media very effectively for work, I also appreciate the real people behind those avatars as well. Do your best not to approach social media as an obligation, but instead place more importance on developing relationships within it. A mindset like this is optimal for greater success!

What are your thoughts? Is it a challenge for you to find time? How do you fit social media into your daily schedule? Feel free to tell us in your comments below…

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Late last year, Google launched real-time search into its algorithm. What does real-time search mean to Googlers? When you perform a Google search, there is a very good chance that the most recent and relevant blog articles, news, and social media conversations related to the search query will show up in Google’s SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages). Social networks ARE relevant in the eyes of Google! Now that Google is indexing social media content in real-time, how can you leverage blogs and social networks to rank on Google?

Read more: How To Use Social Media to Rank on Google

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Marketing with Facebook has quickly become one of the best ways to reach a target audience. With Facebook, you can do many fantastic things for your marketing campaign. Here are 5 tips to keep in mind when marketing using Facebook.

1. Choose Your Target Audience
One of the most important things to keep in mind when you start marketing with Facebook is that you need to zero in on a target audience. Facebook allows you to choose exactly which demographic you want to market to. Therefore, you need to make sure that you take advantage of this feature and select a target market. Depending on what your product is, your target market could vary greatly. Therefore, you need to sit down and determine exactly who you want to see your message and who is the most likely to purchase your product. This can help you avoid wasting money on ads to people outside of your target market.

2. Be Consistent
When you are constructing your ads for marketing with Facebook, you need to make sure that you are consistent with your message. No one likes to click on an ad that they believe to be about one topic and then get to a website that has nothing to do with what they clicked on. This will anger your customers and end up costing you money in the long run. Make sure to be consistent with your message throughout the process and it will pay big dividends.

3. Don’t Blow Your Budget
With Facebook marketing, you can potentially spend a lot of money bringing people to your website. You need to make sure that you set up a daily and weekly budget that you want to stick to. Otherwise, you could easily go over your marketing budget in a short amount of time.

4. Know Your Purpose
Marketing with Facebook is a very powerful tool that can help you bring in massive amounts of traffic to your website. However, if you do not know what you are going to do with the traffic once you get it to your website, there is not much point in getting it. You need to focus on developing your website and making sure that it converts a good percentage of traffic first. Until you have a high conversion rate on your website, there is no point in paying for traffic yet.

5. Get Attention Without Annoying Tricks
When you are constructing your ads for Facebook marketing, you want to make sure that you are going to get the attention of your target audience. However, you do not want to use annoying techniques in order to bring people in. Many people are starting to become accustomed to these over-the-top ads on Facebook. Generally, most people are now ignoring them. Therefore, you have to carefully craft your ad so that it does not turn off your target audience. Think of the people that will be looking at your ad as intelligent individuals. Do not try to dumb it down too much.

You can do this on your own, but you might also want to hire a professional. After all, it is still marketing and you need to make sure you keep to your branding and positioning as you would in all media.

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What do you think of when you think of “social media marketing”? True, most of us have become used to social media listening to connect with friends, renew old contacts from the past, and simply have fun. However, social media marketing may not have actually entered many of our minds as a way to promote our local businesses. It can actually be a very important part of your marketing strategy, since inbound marketing can be a much more effective way to “become found” by people who are already looking for what you have to offer, thus largely bypassing the old competitive paradigm of outbound marketing, where you are basically fighting competitors for your piece of the pie.

Social media marketing in fact really streamlines the process for you so that your marketing efforts can become focused on the audience you really want to zone in on, thus making you both more efficient and more effective. This is cost saving, of course, but it also makes your business much more enjoyable, because you can spend a lot more time marketing to the people you want to market to, while leaving the “the masses” aside.

This is especially true for small local businesses, which generally have a relatively small customer base to market to. However, how do you most effectively use social media marketing as an inbound marketing tactic, so that you draw those customers to you? Here are five things you can do to make your social media marketing efforts most effective.

Start a social networking group that’s focused on the “local”.

Social networking sites like Facebook let you set up groups based upon a topic, niche, and so on. This is a great way to draw people who are already interested in your services or products to you, thus giving you a ready customer base. With a social networking group, you can tell your customers about your products or services, and answer their questions, too. And because it’s locally based, chances are many of those potential customers already feel a certain affinity for you.

Network with other bloggers and business people who are local.

Chances are, many bloggers and other business people are local, too, and networking tools that are also available online can help you find these people; they may be interested in writing about you, linking to your blog, or networking in other ways. This will help increase your exposure, which will also help increase your business. (By the way, return the favor and link to, comment on, etc., other qualified people’s blogs and sites as well, so that they get exposure, too.)

“Meet and tweet” online.

There are social media tools that can help you both create and then advertise local events so that you can draw local people to you. With these, you can hold open houses, provide product demonstrations, and so on.

Similarly, Twitter, too, is a way to gather people together who can then meet locally, centered around your products or services.

Shop for partners or local prospects on social media sites.

Because there are powerful search interfaces built into all social media sites, it’s a small step indeed to simply search for others in your area who are also using social media to find products or services, and/or to network with other people in similar industries.

Make yourself known.

If you create profiles on as many social media sites as you can find, and then link those sites with keywords that are locally based back to your main site, people are going to find you. In other words, put your city and state in your profile, so that people can find you and use your services if they are in nearby locations. You can and should optimize by brand, need, etc., as well, of course, but you should also optimize by location, so that those who want to use local services can easily find you.

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As a rough 2009 draws to a close, the digital marketing world is looking ahead to 2010, hoping to deliver stronger growth in the sector, which is one of the few bright spots in the media world. What lies ahead? We identified 10 trends that are sure to make waves in 2010.
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