Webinar: Blogging for Business – April 27

Posted on April 21, 2011 by Cynthia Closkey

With so many kind of social media and online networks, is good ol’ blogging still useful for business? Yes! This webinar, intended for independent professionals and business owners, will cover the basics of why and how to create a blog for business, and then how to go beyond the basics to make something amazing. Why blog, how to start, where to find content, how to connect it with other marketing and business processes, and where to find help (especially free resources).

Presenter: Cynthia Closkey, President of Big Big Design

Register for this free webinar

Blogging for Business
Wednesday April 27
11:00am EDT
Register now >>

A few notes about this webinar: It will be a 45 minute seminar, including time for questions. I’ll be covering some of the same information from my session of the same name at Pittsburgh PodCamp 5, but updated for 2011.

How will this webinar compare with the course I’m teaching in May at CCAC, “Nonprofit Blogging for Profit“? Well, the CCAC course will be longer — three hours long — and will include hands-on application of some of the topics covered. And it will focus on special needs of nonprofits.

Follow Me: How to Use Social Networks to Build Visibility & Drive Sales

Posted on November 18, 2010 by Cynthia Closkey

Today I’ll be speaking on a panel at the 5th Annual Business Technology Conference, organized by the Small Business Development Center at Duquesne University. Our moderator will be Betsy Benson, Publisher and Vice President of Pittsburgh Magazine, and sharing the panel with me will be the delightful Victoria Dilliott, owner of Affogato Coffee Bar.

Our session title: “Follow Me: How to Use Social Networks to Build Visibility & Drive Sales.”

Follow Me: How to Use Social Networks to Build Visibility & Drive Sales

View more presentations from Big Big Design.

My portion of the session will be an evolution of a session I gave at PodCamp Pittsburgh 5, “Blogging for Business.” I wanted to expand on the ideas I’d discussed at PodCamp, going beyond blogging to a more comprehensive social media communications strategy (and actually beyond social media to online communication as a general thing).

The slideshow includes lots of neat visuals from Flickr and elsewhere (all Creative Commons attributed), but there’s one particular visual I’d like to highlight: the “Killer Blog Strategy Mind-Map” diagram by Johnny Haydon. Communications — and social media/online communications in particular — act much like a loop system, and this diagram does a great job of visualizing the loops of causes and effects. A full diagram of the system would be much more complex, but sometimes the complete complexity obscures the core of what’s going on. If you’re trying to set out your plan to build communications (and community) online, this diagram is the place to start.

More notes to come after the presentation.

FOLLOW-UP:

Thanks to everyone who attended our session. What a fine discussion we had! Very big thanks to Victoria for sharing her story, and to Betsy for moderating the session.

Here is more information for some examples I mentioned during the talk:

Cooks Source controversy: Thorough summary write-up here, the main post by the blogger who first discovered her material had been reprinted without permission.

A sample of how Paper.li shows interesting content from a Twitter account and the users it follows: my Paper.li

Eat’n'Park using social media for last-minute promotions during the Stanley Cup playoffs: coverage in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (6/21/2009)

Cover It Live: great tool for liveblogging an event

Posted on April 2, 2010 by Cynthia Closkey

Last night I attended an interesting discussion at Pitt, “The Future of the Book.” I knew ahead of time that I’d want to share my notes, and I was curious how others might react to the ideas.

So I set up an event on Cover It Live. It’s a simple-to-use gadget for documenting anything as it happens, and it’s able to integrate content from a number of sources — multiple panelists or contributors, Twitter, Facebook, and logged in or anonymous commentors. I’d seen bloggers use it during events like this year’s State of the Union address, and I wanted to try it myself.

Continue reading →

Talk Amongst Yourselves

Posted on March 3, 2010 by Anthony Closkey

I’m cool with “social marketing” and businesses’ presence in social networks. Obviously.

I like blog comments. A lot.

However, it seems I will forever cringe while reading comments on social marketing blogs.

What do you say we try a little experiment with this social marketing blog post!

[I should probably clarify, I've never had a problem with any comment on this blog. We don't get many, and they're rarely, if ever, from the cringe-worthy marketing professionals you see elsewhere.]

Here’s my idea:

Shut out the centralized, public comments.

There are other places where you can commnet on this very post. Google Reader, Google Buzz, Twitter, Facebook, message boards, and other blogs. Heck, you can even talk about it offline! Hopefully, you already know plenty of people who want to hear your opinion of my ideas. People who want your answers to my questions. People who are interested to know which questions you find most interesting.

You’re not commenting just because you like people to see your name and link, right?

So, I’m going to offer a few ideas and questions, in conclusion. Now that you’ve read this post, start a discussion about it amongst the people who already know you. Feel free to invite me into your network to participate. Tell me I’m wrong to my face, it’s cool.

[I was trying to decide if I should leave the "trackbacks" (pingbacks) on.

Cindy offered, "One hazard of this suggestion is that it becomes the original author's (your) responsibility to report back to the blog audience on responses to posts. So then you're setting yourself up as a filter. Open comments avoid this problem; so do trackbacks. They promote transparency."

So, the comment thread can link back to those responding blog posts.]

Okay, then. Here are those questions:

What does my post and this blog lose from closing the comments to this post?
What do I gain? What do other readers gain? What do your blogs, and social circles gain by commenting “locally?”
I’m drawing my line at posts about and for social marketing professionals. I’m not suggesting businesses using blogs to talk to their consumers should do anything like this. But could that line be better drawn some place else?

Let me know where you think.

Photo credit: Ed Yourdon

FAQ: Starting a blog at WordPress.com

Posted on February 26, 2010 by Cynthia Closkey

Q: I want to start a blog for a particular population segment, and I’d like to get sponsors for the blog eventually. My question is this. If I start with a WordPress.com hosted blog just to get some content out there with a readership so that I can then approach sponsors, can I later convert it to a self-hosted blog? Or would it be better just to start as self-hosted? My hope is to start up without the initial cost coming out of my pocket. — Mary

A: It’s not hard to move a site from WordPress.com to your own hosted WordPress blog. WordPress has a built-in tool for exporting and importing. On WordPress.com you can use your own domain name (www.MyGreatSite.com) for a yearly fee, and you can change your site design/layout for a fee. Both are less expensive than the cost of hosting a blog yourself.

I recommend that you upgrade to using your own domain name at the very start. Then, if you eventually move to a self-hosted blog (or if you switch to any other hosted service) and you migrate your existing posts and pages to the new space, the posts will have the same URLs (web addresses, like http://www.bigbigdesign.com/2010/02/faq-how-should-i-start-my-blog/). This is important because Google and other search engines will have indexed the content of your site using those URLs; if the page address were to change, then the value of those indexed pages would be lost. Eventually the search engines would find the pages again, but your site rank would drop in the meantime, and your traffic with it. Using your own domain name helps you retain your site’s value. The cost for using your own domain name for your WordPress.com is about $10/year, a worthwhile investment. You’ll also have to pay a yearly fee to register the domain name.

The design of the blog may not be a big deal when you’re just getting used to blogging — or indeed ever. The blog content you write is the important part.

Two key things you cannot do with WordPress.com are run Google Analytics and run your own ads. The concern about not having Google Analytics is that on WordPress.com your traffics statistics will be limited to those WordPress.com provides for you. These show you the basic number of hits and visitors per day. If your prospective sponsors wanted to know more than your raw traffic counts, you’d have some challenges.

WordPress.com says that in the future you’ll be able to show your own ads on your blog. If that happens, then using the hosted WordPress.com will become much more appealing.

Photo credit: “Britain Going Blog Crazy – Metro Article” by Annie Mole on Flickr

“Pick 8 blogs”: how to be a better online publicist

Posted on January 14, 2010 by Cynthia Closkey

Lindsay Robertson, a freelance writer in New York, published an excellent list for publicists who want to connect with bloggers: “The Do’s and Don’ts of Online Publicity, For Some Reason.” It’s well worth reading and following this entire list of tips.

So often we emphasize what not to do when connecting with bloggers, so I love that this post highlights several things to be sure to do. If you were to do them, you’d have almost no chance of committing any of the Don’ts on the list.

Two in particular cover the majority of the advice: Continue reading →

Getting unstuck

Posted on March 19, 2009 by Cynthia Closkey

Chris Brogan recently posted “20 Blog Topics to Get You Unstuck” — a list of brainstorming ideas to help one get past writer’s block.

Although he aimed this at bloggers, it would be equally useful in thinking of topics for a newsletter to customers and clients, or for an internal newsletter.

Another useful technique is to keep an open file for quickly jotting ideas when you come across them. A bookmarking tool like Delicious is perfect for this — create a tag like mytopics, and mark the bookmark as private if you want to collect your thoughts before sharing it.

At Big Big Design, we’ve recently started using Evernote for tracking thoughts and ideas. This is even more private that Delicious, and I love the iPhone app.

If you’re blogging, use a blogging tool like ScribeFire (Firefox plugin), to start a new draft of a post and keep the relevant links.

But really, you can just have an open text editor window sitting on your desktop. Click, click it’s open; jot the idea, paste in a link to remind yourself where you got the idea (so you can cite your source); and then get back to what you were really working on. When you’re ready to write, you’ve got a ready set of ideas at your fingertips.

Photo credit: “Hole in the wall” by Arria Belli

Client-site launch: SherrieFlick.com

Posted on February 21, 2009 by Cynthia Closkey

Sherrie Flick is a writer and a co-founder of the wonderful Gist Street Reading Series. Her first novel, Reconsidering Happiness, will be published this year. In preparation for marketing that book, she needed a website — one that would showcase her published works and promote her other endeavors.

We felt a blog would be a good addition to the site. It would show her friendly and down-to-earth personality and style, and it would help the site rank better in search engines. But Sherrie wasn’t sure blogging would be right for her. She likes to focus her writing energies on her work, and the idea of placing her personal life online made her uncomfortable.

So instead of a standard-issue blog, we designed a template that’s like the mini-blog format used by Vox and Tumblr. Each entry is a simple photo with caption or a single sentence, so there’s no requirement to write a multiparagraph post. Unlike a miniblog though, we left in the tools for commenting, and we set up a style for a long post in case she ever does want to write a full post.

And the site and blog are all built in WordPress, so she can create new posts and manage her site within a single place.

Secret weapon that’s no longer secret: Blogging for business

Posted on May 31, 2008 by Cynthia Closkey

The excellent blog of SmallFuel Marketing is full of great information about how to do better marketing for small business. But iif you don’t have time to read through the whole site, you can at least check out this article on the whys and hows of small business blogging:

The big picture of blogging for business goes something like this. In
order to be successful with business blogging you’ll need to put in a
good amount of time. Blogs need to be updated regularly, most people
say between 3-5 times per week, so there is a lot of writing involved.
Also, blogging is a very social activity. This means that you should
read and comment on other blogs, as well as network and build
relationships with other bloggers. In summary, it takes time and
effort.

The result of your efforts, however, can be truly outstanding. A
well-designed and frequently updated blog can boost your website to the
top of search results (blogs are awesome from an SEO perspective), it
can draw in thousands of visitors, and it can help build your image as
an authority. A successful blog can serve as branding, advertising,
networking, and sales all rolled into one. And they don’t even cost
much.

The article is full of links to other useful resources too.

Bottom line: While a good blog requires time and effort, it provides excellent return on that investment.

(Link thanks to FreelanceSwitch.)