Business blogging is undisputed as a terrific way to build your corporate brand, your employer brand and personal brand on-line, increase your website traffic and get found in the search engines when people are searching for the products and services that you offer.

However what are some of key mistakes you need to avoid if you want to build a credible business blog? I’m not talking about the mistakes usually referred to such as not posting regularly to your business blog or not engaging in the blogosphere by commenting and linking to other peoples business blogs.

Here are three mistakes I see business bloggers make: [Read more...]

Especially if you are selling a professional service, you are probably aware of the importance of creating information products to promote your expertise and as a new stream of revenue for your business.

It’s becoming easier to add audio and video to the web with new low cost and even no cost tools.

I was researching on-line recently and one particular professional speaker whose site I visited had short audio and video previews of their information products available.

This was well executed although I didn’t much care for the streaming video every time I came back to a page on the site.

The addition of audio and video on the site impacted me as a potential consumer in three specific ways: [Read more...]

I was recently speaking at BarCampDublin about how business blogs are a great way to build buzz about your brand and can enable you to attract more clients and grow your business.

I was talking through my top tips for what makes an effective business or corporate blog.

However when I mentioned that I recommended that as a business leader, we will enhance our personal brand and our corporate reputation by adding our photograph, a couple of people in the audience questioned that recommendation.

Now perhaps this was because the audience were technical companies and I’ve noticed that many technologists and researchers prefer to stay in the background and not always put them selves forward as they consider that as overt self promotion which they prefer not to do. I remember a meeting some months ago for a research institute I am on the board of, where one of the leading medical researchers point blank refused to have their photograph online of the new website that was being launched – although they were very happy to be quoted in research papers and speak to the national media.

One of the audience members replied to the person raising the question and affirmed that they believed that we should have our professional photograph on our business blog or website. For them it instilled trust.

You see, most often the second place that people will click to on your business blog or website is the “about us” page. We want to see who we are doing business with and are asking ourselves:

• Are they credible?
• Are they someone we can relate to?
• Are they in fact a real legitimate business?

[Read more...]