70% of small businesses too busy to update blogs – 4 quick tips July 7, 2009
Posted by Matt Churchill in Blogging.Tags: Blogging, SEO, survey, Write My Site
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According to a new survey from Write My Site, “More than 70% of small businesses say they don’t have time to keep their blogs up to date.”
“62% of respondents set up a blog in the hope that it would increase traffic to their websites. Nevertheless, only 29% are managing to populate them between one and three times each month, with the remaining 71% admitting that their blogs have fallen by the wayside.”
This is a shame as the 125 small business owners who took part in the survey are missing a trick. A blog can help to build a community around your product and become the focal point of that community.
What can you do as a small business to try and manage your time more effectively so that you can blog?
1) Work out why you want/need to blog in the first place – are you broadcasting or creating a community?
2) Are you writing time sensitive material? If not, why not spend an evening writing three or four different posts and then schedule them to be regularly posted ie every Monday morning
3) Is there a team member in your business other than yourself who is tuned in to the blogosphere? Consider asking them if they’d like to contribute/manage your blog
4) Do you commute to work? What are you doing during that time? Could it be used to draft ideas for a blog post or even write something that can be crafted at a later date?
One blog post a week or month will be compelling enough to begin helping to position your company as switched on, or help your customers to discover more about your, and its, personality – it is not a task that should be taken half heartedly, and promoting your blog and getting a following can be as big an incentive as you need to spur you on to write more.
Weekly Round Up 05.07.09 July 5, 2009
Posted by Matt Churchill in Weekly Round Up.Tags: Internet Explorer 8, Macbook Pro, Moonfruit, Read Write Web, Spam, Tweetdeck, Twitter
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One of the more annoying/good Twitter campaigns so far, has this week come from the Moonfruit team, who have been goving away Macbook Pros everyday in return for the simple addition of a hashtag at the end of a tweet. The idea is simple, the execution even simpler, but what about the moonfruit spam? My personal opinion on this one is that although the idea is clever, the execution has been poor, and the boasting about the success is just downright horrifying. It’s all well and good telling the PR community about the good job you did, but a BBC Technology Correspondent?
Adverts on Twitter are becoming increasingly more noticeable (or not) according to Read Write Web who have picked up on the sponsored links appearing on Twitter’s homepage. I don’t think this is a huge issue as I generally use Tweetdeck, and until they begin to flood me with ads, or updates beging to appear in my actual stream, it has very little affect on my use of the service.
There’s been a huge storm over a ‘new’ video promoting Internet Explorer 8 which shows a woman throwing up over her laptop – not a smart move by Microsoft if this is actually by them. I’m not going to embed it here as I don’t really think it’s that suitable, if you must, try looking for it here. What the video has done is actually caused a self censoring of many and a line of decency to be crossed – for once the Internet has reacted badly to something seemingly thought of as just a little bit of fun, and it’s been pulled.
6 Month Blog Stats July 5, 2009
Posted by Matt Churchill in Profile.Tags: Alexa, Blog stats, Compete, Del.icio.us, Digg, Google, Links, Netcraft, Quantcast, Rankings, Technorati, yahoo
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Seeing as we’re half way through the year, I thought I’d briefly indulge in some catharsis by looking at some stats from this here blog (everyone else does it so why shouldn’t I?). As a blogger, it is always interesting to see what posts are most popular and then to try and work out why, so that you can start creating content that rings your community’s bell.
This year i’ve written 181 (now 182) posts, which is pretty much one a day!
So, the 10 most popular posts from January to now are:
Compare The Meerkat
Spotify, MTV Staying Alive and Safe Sex
Top Gear’s Stig is not Michael Schumacher
Michael Jackson dies – Internet crumbles
JCPR Twitter Index
Primark Sweatshop PR Disaster
Spotify – free ad-funded music
Seesmic Desktop Review – Twitter’s new Tweetdeck Rival
How To Get A Job in PR – Part 1
How to pitch to bloggers
This tells me two things: 1) Timely news pieces attract readers who wouldn’t have come acrtoss the blog 2) ‘How To’ guides are supposedly more interesting than the complex social media theories i’m coming up with (joke!)
To that end, how many people are actually coming here?
Page views: 23,516
Uniques: 17,843
First Time Visitors: 16,138
Returning: 1,705
Now I for one would prefer the page views to be a little lower and the number of people returning to be a touch higher! So, please let me know what sort of content you’d like to see more of and what I can do to keep your attention by leaving me a comment!
The numbers below are taken from WM Tips:
Rankings
Google Page Rank:3
Alexa 3 month Rank: 347,648 up 147,382
Compete.com rank: 33
Quantcast rank: 23
Netcraft rank:1,013,875
Technorati rank: 182,578
Links
On-Page links count: 311 (nofollow: 12)
PR/Links ratio: 0.01
Yahoo inbound links count: 589
Yahoo indexed subpages count:303
Sites linking in (Alexa): 44
Inbound blogs (by Technorati): 21
Links from blogs (by Technorati): 58
Del.icio.us: Saved by 0 people
Is page digged?: Yes, 1 diggs
Digged stories from this domain: 184
Over the next 6 months I hope to keep this blog growing and to keep producing content that will keep you coming back for more! Drop me any ideas for anything you’d like to see below :-)


























