How do I blog?

I was delighted to find land in my inbox one of the few email newsletters that I do keep and read. This one was from Business Link, a website I have visited many times and would urge you to consult as a first port of call with any business query. With great timing around my last couple of blog posts it gave me a link to a very informative guide on how to write a blog that people want to read!

Need I say more. Apart from that in order to actually write a blog you need to set one up. Using Google's Free Blog service, as I have done, you can easily be blogging before breakfast. You do need a Google Account but this just enables you to use all the other wonderful free tools from Google, including Google Analytics, which I would reccomend should be, if not all ready, in your websites to track your traffic.

Of course at any point you get stuck with all this stuff just drop me an email and see how I can help.

Social Media Pets

If you are going to have them you must feed them!

We are being told left, right and centre that we should be blogging or tweeting or linked-in. Some of us have Facebook profiles which are easy for personal use to dip in and out of as we wish but from a business perspective does that do more harm than good?

I do believe that these social media presences are like pets and they need feeding regularly. You'll see that this is my first blog post since before Christmas. Slap. My social media pets have almost died of starvation so my aim is to feed snippets every other week and larger feasts at least once a month.

So rather than sign up to all of them at once why not start off with one, get into the habit of feeding it little and often or at a set time each week and then when that is second nature to you and easy to manage, you can perhaps introduce another.

Linked in, I would say is a good starting point. You can set a profile (yes you should put a photo up on it), add events that you go to, put a small snippet of what you are up to and make connections. This then gives you other examples of what to update people about.

The reason I think a photo is important is that transparency is a good thing. I like to know who I am talking to and like many people I meet networking, I'm terrible at remembering which names go with which faces.

You can also style your profiles to fit your brand. This can be done with photo's logos and backgrounds and they needn't be expensive to create either.