Business Blogging Pros

Event Calendar for Your Blog

One of the most common requests I get when creating a client's blog is an event calendar. If you are speaking or appearing at events a calendar is a great way to keep your audience up to date.  A calendar full of events sends the message that you are active and actually doing things.

We've tested and used a lot of calendar plugins for WordPress and in my opinion this one is the best:

All-In-One Event Calendar

It utilizes custom post types for events, which is (in my opinion) the right way to do it. It supports all the event-related fields you commonly could need as well as the ability to display a Google map.

Combining RSS Feeds

How do you combine RSS feeds from two sources? Yahoo Pipes. 

As some of you know, I'm rebranding the company from Business Blogging Pros to Klaroty Strategic Marketing. I've started a new blog named Engineered For Revenue on the Klaroty site. It will cover our website design activity, strategic marketing, and general social media issues. In the future the Business Blogging Pros blog will be focused specifically on the topic of blogging.

I would really like for the subscribers to this blog to continue to receive all the content even though the source of some of it has moved.  Yahoo Pipes to the rescue.

Yahoo Pipes has been around for a long time. It has a simple drag-and-drop interface that allows you to construct some very sophisticated RSS processes.  You can even filter out duplicate content and search RSS feeds for certain keywords.

It was a simple matter to create a pipe that takes all my desired feeds as inputs and output them together as a single RSS feed. Then I simply went to Feedburner and changed the feed source from blog.businessblogginpros.com to the Yahoo pipe.

A Story of Blogging's Impact on a Website's Google Ranking

My cat is missing. Among the ordinary and extraordinary things I've done, was the creation of a blog that is essentially a 'lost cat' ad. It's been up just 3 days and already if you search for "lost siamese cat phoenix" it is the third entry on the first page of Google (out of four million results returned).

Whether or not it results in the return of my cat is not the point of this blog entry. The point is that this is another real-world example that a blog and a little bit of strategic SEO work can produce impressive Google rankings.

Instagram Just Committed Suicide

Instagram has announced they are changing their terms of service so that they can sell your photos (and I don't mean 'sell them for you'. I mean 'make money off your photos':

http://money.cnn.com/2012/12/18/technology/social/instagram-sell-photos/

What possesses a company's management team to make decisions like this?  What were they thinking?  

I'm not a professional photographer but my content is MY content dammit. I deleted my Instagram account today as a result.  I'm sure a lot of other people are doing the same.

Google+ Communities: At Last a Reason to Visit Google+

In a recent rant, I talked about why I think Facebook is doomed. The reason is that Facebook lacks any facility for topic-specific communities.

Let's say for example that your hobby is wine making. There is no place in Facebook you can go and exclusively discuss winemaking with your fellow winemakers.

Google must have been listening because they just launched a new feature of Google+ called 'Communities'. One of my hobbies is breadmaking and I've already joined The Art of Bread.

I can't emphasize enough the significance of this for businesses. If you sell an accessory for banjo players, you should go where banjo players hang out. Find the online communities of, by, and for banjo players and spend your time there. Get known. Get trusted.

Facebook has entirely missed the boat. Those kinds of communities don't exist. If Google gets Google+ Communities right - and that's a big 'if' - it could be the thing that finally makes Google+ viable.

Why I Think Facebook Is Doomed.

If you are a photography buff and own a Nikon then Nikonians is the place for you - A vibrant community full of the entire range of people from experts to beginners all passionate about their topic and eager to share and talk about it.

Play the banjo? There is a community for that. There are communities for cooking, hunting & shooting, and learning a language. There is even a community for people who raise chickens. 

All of these communities have one thing in common: They are full of conversation and knowledge.  Each time I visit Nikonians I learn so much and come away feeling enriched.

None of these communities are on Facebook.

Pick a topic and try to find a vibrant group on Facebook for it. In fact, there doesn't even seem to be a way to find people who share your interests. And even if you could find them and 'friend' them, most of their Facebook posts will have nothing to do with your specific shared interest. Facebook used to have a Discussions tab you could add to a page. That function was removed a long time ago.  In fact, Facebook is devoid of the structure necessary for people to gather around a common interest and focus on it.

Perhaps this is why so many people feel that Facebook is a waste of time.

The message here for small business owners is that you need to think carefully about what you are trying to accomplish with social media. Sometimes Facebook is the perfect tool.  Sometimes it is not.

Sprinkler World

Sprinkler World is the lodest prinkler and irrigation company in the Phoenix area. We were honored that they chose us to build their new website.

We started with a stock, off-the-shelf WordPress theme and modified it to fit their business image and the way they work.  To Sprinkler World Managemnet, the most attractive aspect of their new website is not how it looks. It's the fact that they are now in control and can easily make changes and additions themselves.

Revelation Wellness

We built Revelation Welless' first website a few years ago.  Recently the founder, Alisa Keeton, came to us and asked us to explore the potential of a new website.

This website is a great example of what custom wordpress development can do.

• Custom home page with multiple calls to action presented as action photos.
• Custom inner page templates
• Integration with Google Maps
• Integrated eCommerce store
• Community forums
• Paid-Subscription-Only area full of videos and other exercise program materials
• Separate access-controlled are just for instructors with it's own instructor-only store.
• Home Page Carousel capabler of handling both video and images.

Social Media ROI

Long ago, I learned from a wise sales coach to determine how many hands I needed to shake at one end of the pipeline to generate a dollar of sales at the other end of the pipeline.

When it comes to social media, unfortunately most people ignore that. The time/energy they spend on social media is disconnected from any measure of results.  As a result, too much time, energy, and money are expended with no measurable return.

I suggest approaching the problem from a different direction.  Example: I recently worked with a client to gets most of her business via referrals, and needed more referrals.  How could we bring about more referrals? We examined many ways and determined that the most effective way would be to perform a very specific activity on Facebook in a very specific manner.  

Do you see what this does? Not only did my client now have a very specific 'Why' (reason) for performing this Facebook activity, she can measure the results.

 

Responsive Website vs Separate Mobile Website

The latest buzz is the Responsive website.  The term 'responsive website' means that it is a website design that automatically adjusts its format to various screen sizes. Responsive website designs are being touted as the perfect solution for companies that need both a desktop and a mobile website.

The problem is that you may be doing your mobile viewers a disservice and be driving them away. We recently completed a project for a client that included both a 'desktop' website as well as a mobile version. We discovered that when mobile users visited the company's website they were looking for different information than desktop users. By creating a separate mobile website, we were able to provide the mobile users with exactly the information they were looking for with the fewest possible taps.

We have in our stable of tools a WordPress plugin that makes adding a mobile website very easy. We've customized and modified it to meet our needs and certified it to play nicely with our other WordPress themes and plugins. In the end, this is a much more cost-effective solution than developing a 'responsive' website from scratch.