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| INNOVATE! Technology, Tools, Tips, & Techniques | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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October 2009
Dear Client,
Welcome to INNOVATE!, an administrative resource for small business owners. INNOVATE! is a product of Cybertary, a professional Virtual Assisting company. In these monthly emails we will be giving you numerous resources and tips you can use in your business, your home, your office, and your life!
In the October issue of INNOVATE!, Cybertary helps you ease into the blogosphere with some useful tips to help you decide what to write about, how to find your customers, and what to do in order to keep them engaged. Your blog should be short, concisely written, informative, fresh, and interesting. You want to grab your audience, entice them with good information, encourage them to engage, and give them an incentive to come back and read your next post.
Most importantly, blogging doesn't have to be a frightening experience -- a blog can be both fun and functional. The more often you blog, the better chance you have of increasing your search engine rankings and turning your blog into a must-read.
Enjoy!
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| What is SEO? | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Search Engine Optimization Demystified
 For example, let’s say you run a business that sells plumbing services and supplies. A potential customer goes to one of the main search engines — typically, Google, Yahoo!, or MSN — to look for a plumber to repair a leaky pipe, so they type in “plumbing repair”. A page of results comes back and your desire is to be at, or near, the top of the list. At the very least, you want to be on the first page as most people won’t dig further than the second or third pages looking for solutions. |
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| Building Your Blog | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Create Customer Relationships
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| What is Your Blogging Strategy? | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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By Amanda Collins,
Chief of Staff, The Grammar Doctors
Unfortunately – but not surprisingly – too many business owners are intimidated at the prospect of blogging for their business. “I’m not a good writer,” they say. Or, worse, “I’m not sure what to write.” Since blogs are a bit more informal, it’s okay to not be an excellent writer. Instead, a blog is a way to share information and tell a little bit about you; although, as The Grammar Doctor, I want your writing to be good, it doesn’t have to be “A” caliber; “C” works just as well in this arena. For those who aren’t sure on what to write, I suggest grabbing your calendar. Okay, now that you’re looking at a few months in advance … well, breathe first … it’s not that bad! I promise, this strategy will give you some great tools to get blogging! First, think about your business. I’m guessing you can break it down into four distinct components. Perhaps you’re an image consultant. Your four components might be clothes, shoes, coloring, and accessories. A network marketer for a skincare line might use skincare, makeup, household items, and a new product. As luck would have it, there are four weeks in most months! Like magic, you now have a category to write about each week. |
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| CyberQuick-Tip: Scheduling Your Blog Posts | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Blogger Makes it Easy!
 One of the best web tools for developing and keeping customers for your business is a blog. A good blog will inform and entertain no matter if it is 250 or 1,250 words. It will also develop a fan base through regular postings, and therein lies challenge: how do you maintain a regular blogging schedule? Blogging is creative writing, and sometimes bloggers are inspired, but sometimes they are stuck. Writing blog post frequently is the key to getting and maintaining a consistent readership level, but sometimes your blog is due before your brain is willing to cooperate.
A wonderful tool for maintaining regular blog output, is Blogger’s scheduled post publishing feature. During one of those inspired bursts of creativity, write as many entries as you can, then use this tool to schedule your posts at some time in the future. When the date and time of each post arrives, it will automatically be published to your blog. Need to unschedule a future post? No worries, you can! Want to have your post appear in your blog now, and again at a later date? Not a problem. Publish it in your blog with the current date and time and then edit it with the future date and time. Whether you’re going on vacation, inspired to write several blogs at once, or you want to repeat a time-dependent theme, scheduled post publishing is a convenient tool for keeping your blog up to date. |
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THEME - A Harvest of Ideas from Cybertary
This newsletter is a product of Cybertary, Inc. Please review our policy for reprinting any portion of this newsletter on your own site. |
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