The Blog Studio

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Bloggers: I am your target market. I am the person you want to have reading your content. But guess what? I’m overwhelmed. The web is incredibly noisy and filled with eye candy.

To get me to read your posts, they must follow these rules:

• Use excellent typography and be easy to read.


• If you use images, make them large and sprinkle them throughout the text.


• Use video whenever possible. It’s nearly impossible for me not to click the play button.


• Make regular use of headings.


• Use bold and italic to make it easy to pick out key words as I skim. I skim a body of text before I decide to read it. Give me a reason to double back and read your words.


• Use lists


• Be as brief as possible.

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Over on my personal blog, I’m posting a series looking into the redesign and re-thinking of that site. It’s an interesting process. To date, I’ve just posted some shots of my notes. For anyone interested in what goes on a redesign though, it will give you some pretty deep insight as the series continues.

Here are a couple of shots:

If you want to check out the series, here’s part 1 and part 2. I’ll update this post, so feel free to bookmark this!

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During an interview with Darren Rowse, SEO expert Aaron Wall responds to the following question: How is blogging important to your overall business?

It is huge. Where others are buying $5,000 booths at conferences and spending $500 a day on AdWords my marketing spend is next to nothing because I get many sales from people talking about me. Plus blogging got me media exposure which makes it easier to get more media exposure down the road. I was a no name SEO with one popular article before I started SEO Book, but now I have thousands of subscribers and thousands of customers. The single most important part of my business right now is blogging.

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A tag is keywords used in association with the content on a website, bookmark, photo or blog post. People categorize their posts with a tag – just like they may categorize their post with a category.

There are web services such as flickr (used for photos), technorati (used for blogs) and del.icio.us (used for saving favorites) that use tags to help organize and find information.

What tagging their post does is it helps when people are searching for a specific key word to find information that anyone has tagged with that key word. People can use different tags for the same resource and you can use more then one tag for the same resource.

Here is an example of why this works:

Thousands of people work in the branding industry. When they write information on the web they can tag it with the word branding.

If those people are looking for other information on branding they can go to technorati and search for that tag and see all blog information that has come up with that tag OR they can go to del.icio.us and search for that tag and see any favorites people have saved with that tag.

You can read on how to contribute to the technorati tag pages http://technorati.com/help/tags.html">here. 

Tagging is a topic that can be discussed in much further detail. At this stage I just want to give you the basic definition of what this is for easy understanding. I will soon post more information about tagging and the more advanced ways to use tags for your posts.

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Hey – I’m in Florida at the moment, soaking up the sun, so this will be short and sweet. I was asked the other day (while in the swimming pool no less) why a business owner should be blogging. Here’s my quick response:

great value – can’t beat the price

expand your reach – take your business global

find new markets – take advantage of the long tail to do what you really love

turn customers into evangelists

create dialog with your clients

find hidden opportunities – see find new markets above

force you to think about your business – an often overlooked benefit of writing about your stuff regulary

build relationships with your most vocal customers

replace yellow pages – know anyone under 30 who uses the yellow pages?

spread buzz

humanizing – puts a face and personality to the business

create top of mind awareness

build trust-based relationships

build time-based relationships

tap into strong branding power

take advantage of virtual word of mouth marketing

This list is woefully incomplete. What else should I add?