Blogging is a great way to share anecdotes, information and ideas in an informal setting, but writing for your business is a slightly different task. What you write will affect your business, if it didn’t then why would you write it, so you need to make sure that the effort you put into blogging translates into a positive effect.

Blogs are designed to be written by opinionated individuals, they are by nature not simply the imparting of impartial information, so you have to walk an interesting line of being able to share information and opinions, keeping your audience engaged but not alienating them.

So here are 5 quick tips to simple blogging. 

1. Develop a Good Writing Style

Use good grammar and spelling and don’t use text abbreviations. If your writing is sloppy then this will be reflected on your organisation. If you sit at a table in a restaurant and its sticky and dirty then your opinion of the restaurant is going to go down. If the blog is haphazard or poorly written then this is going to reflect badly on your organisation. You use an informal, relaxed and laid back style, of course, it’s not going to be a marked essay, but it does need to obey the rules of good written English.

2. Be Consistent and Write Regularly

Google likes regular content. Your readers will like regular content. If you regularly write 10 posts per month and then stop for a couple of months any readers you have will drift away and Google will stop visiting as well. Blogs with big holes always look like the company concerned just had better things to do that look after their customers, like a shop with no-one at the till. So pick a number of blog posts per month you have time to write and then stick with it. If you can’t keep it up then lower the number of posts, but keep going and try to be consistent.

3. Stick to the Topic

Stay relevant and on the topic you started with. A blog’s not your life story, it’s a single idea explored in a bit of detail. If you move around different themes within a single post then you are going to lose your audience. Similarly, if you go into too much detail in a single post your audience will not finish the post. If your article is more than a couple of pages in Word (around 1000 words) then I tend to think that you may have more than one blog post there and it is worth splitting it out into a series of posts. You can list them over a few days.  

4. Link to Relevant Additional Information

Links within a blog can offer more information about something you are describing or you might want to point at a product you’re promoting. Also, since I just gave you a max of 1000 words and you need to be concise within your blog, then appropriate linking will help your readership find out more or buy that product if they want to. You can link within your own site or you can link to another (non competitor) site. It all helps demonstrate your knowledge, inform your readership and with your SEO.

5. Have a sense of Humour

When you’re writing your blog, try not to take yourself too seriously. You may cover a serious topic that requires a certain gravitas, but on other occasions, if you can submit your information with a light hearted and laid back tone then your readership will find it easier to digest. Try to bring some humanity to your writing and try to connect to your readership.

So the key to good blogging is, use good English, stick to one topic per blog and keep it short and sweet. Write regularly and write with a sense of humour. Hopefully some new bloggers will find this helpful in their early days, I sure could have done with a few pointers when I was writing my first blog.

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We all know that Google is a search engine but not everyone knows that Google as a corporation has not only shown the world the power of brand, product and service but also offers us some of the most powerful tools in the web marketplace – for free.

It was a stunning stroke of genius the day that the guy’s and gal’s at Google set to offering the world professional, useful web tools for free.

Google Analytics currently has over 52% of the world’s web tracking market and this is only set to rise as Google techies provide us with more and more powerful elements.
Measuring your marketing is no new thing but by providing anyone and everyone with an easy to use tool that collates, formulates and turns the data into a visual representation of what’s working and what’s not in our online marketing mix is in my option a tool that you would just be foolish to miss out on.

We include a Google Analytics Account setup for all our new clients free of charge, but for those who don’t have it set up or could just do with a little extra help getting started:

Go to the web address http://www.google.com/analytics/sign_up.html to sign up or http://www.google.com/analytics/ and log into your Google account. If we haven’t set an account up for you or you haven’t got a Google Account you will need to set one up first and then create an Analytics account from your control panel. [Setting Up a Google Account]
Overview Page: This is where all the websites that you may be monitoring will be held, Click on the Account Name (which is a hyperlink) to look at the data on the individual websites, select ‘View Report’.

This will give you a visual view of your data:

The graph at the very top (as shown above) represents the visits to your site and breaks it down into daily figures in any one given month.
It provides you with Bounce Rate (the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance) which indicates how relevant your visitors found the entrance page, Average time your visitors spent on your site (which helps you judge content quality) and New visits (those that have visited your site for the first time)

The map overlay shows you which areas of the world (yes the world) are showing an interest in your website and the traffic overview shows you how those visitors came to find your site.

So immediately you can see the data that Google Analytics captures for you can help you track ROI, and help create a targeted and informative ‘next move’ strategy.

Totally Free and growing all the time ……

Look out for more blogs on this topic and feel free to add a request.

I’m a web developer, not a salesman. My job is to ensure that any website code we write meets our strict quality guidelines and the thought of making the hard sell turns me to jelly. I don’t have the confidence or the chat to call myself a natural born salesman, I am a computer nerd for crying out loud.

So Why Am I Writing An Article On Salesmanship?

The answer is simple, I have to go out and sell sometimes. I’m a director in a small business we all have to do it. Without it Rake Mark would have folded years ago. So if I’m so rubbish at selling how do I overcome that to make a sale? These are my 5 quick tips to my brethren of fellow reluctant salesmen and women.

Believe in the Product

I couldn’t sell anything I didn’t believe in. I honestly believe that we offer the best website design products on the planet. No one offers the range of skills that we do, the depth of quality design that we do and absolutely no one offers the products we do at the most affordable prices. It is that simple.

I honestly believe that if I don’t demonstrate to a potential customer why they should select Rake Mark then they will pay more than they need to for a substandard product. I don’t want that and they don’t want that, so it is my duty to ensure that they understand what we do and why we are the number one draft pick for Website Design in the West Midlands

Understand the Market

Knowing your customers needs, fears and desires is a must. If you cannot stand in the shoes of your customers and feel what they feel and fear what they fear, then get into a business where you know it this intimately. Only when you understand their needs can you fill the gap in their lives. Only when you appreciate the problem can you offer the solution. Some simple market research will help fill in the finer detail, but you should know generally the what, why, and when of their buying without it being spoon fed.

Focus on the Customer

Your customers will buy based on the benefits of the product, not the features. You don’t buy shampoo, you buy beautiful manageable hair. The guy in the sports car didn’t buy it because he wants to accelerate from the lights at top speed only to be stuck in traffic with everyone else. He bought it for prestige. When he drives it he feels successful, free, and important.

So focus on how your customer feels about your product, what do they need and then demonstrate how your products, services, company and brand can solve that fear, that problem. Show your customers how they will feel when they buy your product and how that fills their needs. They will buy from you.

Overcoming Objections

Talking to your customers or potential customer will help to build a rapport and move the conversation towards closing the sale, the crucial buying moment. Often during the sales process you will come across resistance, an objection. Always respect the customer’s issue. Give it its due consideration to any valid concerns and ensure that your answer eases concerns and doesn’t add to them. If you can genuinely listen to their problem and help them solve it they will buy from you. 

Close the Sale

This is the key moment. If the customer looks at their watch or appears uninterested then move to the close. How do you close? You simply ask for the business. The key is to ask in a way that doesn’t offer an yes or no response.

So if you thrust an order form under their nose and say, ‘Would you like to move forward?’ they might well say no. However, if you say ‘If you don’t have any other questions then all I need you to do is sign the order and we can arrange your kick off meeting. Which day next week suits you better?’ You could use a payment method question, like ‘Would you like to pay using cash or your credit card?’ Or if it is a large payment and you offer a payment plan then ‘Would you like to pay in one instalment or would you like to take advantage of our payment plan?’

There are multiple closing statements that you could make. It is a very important moment and the only area that I rehearse in advance so I feel confident asking for the business.

Sales is an area that all small businesses must excel in and work on.

Good Luck.

Most of us (those who show any interest in the web), if we are in the industry or not will have heard about or know of Cascading Style Sheets/CSS.
Old Style coding was to style the page, on the page e.g.

But as I am sure you can imagine, not only did this make the page really cluttered, it also meant that every change would need to be done on every page, which is ok if you have 4 pages but if you had 100 pages this could make updating you website a bit of a chore.

Enter stage left CSS – Separating content from design and layout is a much slicker way to develop. It keeps pages clean and uncluttered, it keeps pages loading faster (browsers cache CSS) and makes updates not such a daunting task.

Ok, so building from your very basic web page in our previous tutorial we can now alter how our page looks from an external CSS (Style sheet)

If you are using an editor then create a style sheet giving it the name “StyleSheet.css” in the same location as your web page e.g. if you web page is on the desktop your CSS should be saved their also.

Go into your web page and add the element:

To the Head tag. Your syntax should now look as below:

Go back to your Stylesheet and enter the sytax:

Save it, reload your web page, if your web page has just changed colour then I guess you are all set!

Blog Tip: If you are using multiple style sheets on one project, don’t forget to note them at the top of your page, a reminder for you and a helping hand if another developer edits your code.

Starting with the basics of all basics, what is a web page? A web page is a file that sits on what we call a web server and is read or rendered in a browser like Internet Explorer or Opera or whichever browser you prefer to use really but one thing remains consistent – they all render Basic HTML Syntax/ our web pages.

The standard syntax of a web page is:

Open notepad, Copy the above text, save it as myFirstWebPage.html onto your desktop and run it (double click on the file). It will display a very basic HTML page displaying “My First web page”

Well done, you have written your first web page. Try changing the text within the “title” tags see what happens.

Now all we have to do is make it a little more interesting!

I plan to make this a regular blog topic, and when I think of something that I think you guys might find useful I will be sure to post it …. Requests are also more than welcome.

Blog Tip: Keep you code clean and neat, Google loves clean code and the neat thing is for when you have to de-bug – and you will learn the value of that if you don’t.