It’s a question many ask, several find the answer to, only a very few do anything about: “How Do I Start A Business Blog”?

Don’t just dash into this. You need to cross a deep river. It’s a cold river. And it’s a fast-running river. But there really are amazing treasures in the jungle beyond: personal fulfillment, development and, yes, money. Lots of it, should you really wish (yes, we’ve been taking a couple of the literary excitement tablets! )

But money should never be the pure motivation for doing anything, in our view. It should be a by-product (yes, not a bad by-product, but one all the same) of a great business. Some make look upon this with scorn, but it’s a view we share with many successful businesses/business models.

Objectives

Business blogging may be there to promote an existing business; it may be there to be a business in itself. The biggest tip of all is to learn from the community of existing bloggers. There are literally millions of them out there, with hundreds of millions of hours of experience.  Learn from the community, not just the experts (by the way, often the every day community members are, by a long way, more ‘expert’ that some of the ‘experts’).

Is Blogging a “fad”?

No (I guess you’d expect us to say that, right?)  Seriously, though, no.  It may (and is) develop(ing), but those who said it was dead were/are wrong.  Just type ‘blog’ into Google and see the hits in many many different forms.  It’s as powerful as some of the best and most established forms of communication on the web.

And it’s growing. Just take a look at some recent stats to understand that growth… Technorati’s “State of the Blogosphere” is about the best out there.

Quoting from this publication:

“Blogs are Pervasive and Part of Our Daily Lives
There have been a number of studies aimed at understanding the size of the Blogosphere, yielding widely disparate estimates of both the number of blogs and blog readership. All studies agree, however, that blogs are a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream.

The numbers vary but agree that blogs are here to stay…”

Will you become a millionaire?

The stories about amazing riches from blogging are just that: stories. But there are, indeed, a few tried and very well tested methods which can make $000s of dollars a month for business bloggers. For every single one of those promised “thousands of dollars”, there’s a guide written by a guru. Well, there are gurus and gurus!

Some guides are genuinely worth the money. Others are not. Like everything in life, you pay your money and take your choice!  But give yourself the weapons for the fight and, even more importantly, understand the fight.

Even those who make money the ultimate goal and like their Ferraris (Rob Benwell, for example!!) understand the real guts of business and don’t lose sight of that.  Never lose sight of it either!

5 Top Tips On Information Guides (part of a life raft to help with that river!):

-1 Don’t believe anything you read until you’ve read it not once, not twice, but FIVE times. Preferably separated by healthy doses of coffee and broken by a walk to the park. Seriously.

-2 Even then, don’t take out the credit card until you’ve read it again. And then a couple more times.

-3 Research the author of the guide and know your topic inside out, upside down.  Look at independent recommendations.

-4 Give yourself the ‘cold towel treatment’: “is this really helpful”? Does it REALLY do what it says “on the tin”?

-5 Plan. Plan. Plan. Plan a little more.

There are no quick fixes in life: helpful assistance is great, and essential as stellar marketing/finance gurus like Alvin Phang do show.  However, you must do it for yourself.  And you must do it – no-one else can.  Be guided, but you’re at the steering wheel.

-6 (I said 5, right? well, it’s a good topic…)  ENJOY YOURSELF

Rob Benwell’s

Core Tips on Business Blogging

The Search Engines (see- capital S, capital E – true reverence )  know how to separate the good from the bad. Google is, frankly, the King of this with its relevance algorithms.

This is fundamental, as there is a lot of trash out there. Some try to beat the system. However, 90 or so percent of the time, Google will serve up the most relevant information requested in its search box.

Most of the general population have, in the last few years, missed that the Yellow Pages (and equivalents) are dead. Fact. Linked (heavily to this) is that Google redefined “search”.

Blogs  and  “new” information have taken over. Yes, you guessed it: business owners are, and really, really, should, use this to their  advantage.

This is the real, dynamic power  of blogs.  Providing personal, topic-focused or “whatever else” information. Google  is passionate about new, fresh information.  Without it, most websites are crawled and logged poorly by Google et al: they provide old, irrelevant and unhelpful information. Also, despite massive advances in technology, the Google spiders (robots) are relevant simple guys: they like to crawl fresh, plain, relevant text.  Flash, images, etc, etc, really screw up the party.  Really, really remember this (ok, yes, you can submit xml sitemaps, etc, nowadays but let’s get real).

We’re not advocating completely textual pages – we don’t have them.  But don’t go nuts with the video!
Generally, webmasters have to push people to websites.  Most website traffic, is usually  direct hits. Pushed  traffic. People who already know the name of your company and know what people have for lunch on Fridays.  The information these websites provide usually does not attract the search robots.

You can pull people  to a blog. It can attract readers organically. Most blog traffic usually comes in organically. Readers find  your blog, not the other way around.  That’s the KEY difference for us.  Period.

Look out for Part II, guys.