April 2010 - Issue 10

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Hello!
Welcome to the April edition of The Maestro Monthly, an email newsletter published by the Web Maestro. The intent of this publication is to bring you news and updates on Web Maestro services, local business news, as well as general Web related news.

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The Quickest Way To Get Ignored On The Web

by Nathan Lyle

If you'd like your website to be completely ignored by everyone, make it a copy of your company's old brochures. Use lots of sentences like "Our primary goal is to provide synergistic business solutions" and "We utilize proactive approaches to create win-win situations" and so on. Don't forget to include a photograph on the main page of a generic board room with successful looking people from your favorite stock photo collection, or even better, pulled randomly from a Google image search.

Here's the thing... no matter how large your audience (target market) is, your website is only ever going to speak to one person at a time. When you get on an elevator and someone asks you what you do, I bet you don't ramble on for five minutes about synergy and creative solutions. If you want your website to succeed, at just about whatever your goal might be, you need to engage your visitors on an individual basis. When you use the old-school corporate lingo, you might as well be poking them in the eye. (Though that would at least gain a strong response, whereas most mission statements slip past the attention of anyone not directly involved in writing them.)

This makes some people uncomfortable, because in a sense it means having to create relationships. That's not something that's always done very easily. One of the great things about the Web, however, is that a website allows you to provide many different ways for a person to interact, effectively letting people choose their own relationship with you. This lets you widen your net farther than what you could ordinarily accomplish with a salesperson in a crowded room of customers...

[read the full article]

Want to read more articles? Read previously published articles on our website's article archive.

Invasion of the Blogs

Guest Article by Meryl K. Evans

Lemmings are cute, but dumb. If you tell them to jump off a cliff, they will. Just like the people who start blogs because everyone is doing it. Guess what happens after a little while? The blogs die.

In managing a list of many Web sites, most of which are blogs, I deleted countless sites from the list because the sites and blogs no longer existed. The people ran out of steam or had no reason to start them in the first place.

How do you know when a blog is right for your business? Learn why people start blogs, how they find their niche and how blogging tools can be used for more than blogs.

Some people like to read blogs, others like to read newsletters, still others like to rely on feeds and some read a few or all of them. No matter the method the information is distributed, each medium has one thing in common: content. Having a blog connects your newsletter and your business with all of these readers and delivers important content in a particular style.

I've been blogging since June 2000. If you review my early blog entries in meryl's notes, you'll notice they're more personal. When blogs first hit the scene in the late '90s, they were personal diaries and journals. Like the blog business, my blog has transformed from personal to business speak, although I still add personal notes here and there.

A few bloggers tend to talk about their work, their products and their little world. That might work for celebrities where fans want to know everything about them, but it doesn't work for the average business person. Other business people want information on how to succeed and when a blog spends time hawking products offering information of no value, few people will return. The people whose products sell well are the ones who provide valuable information. Readers already know what kind of information they're getting, so they trust that when they buy something, it will be of the same or better quality. This value must be reflected in their blog. It's much like people who only sign up for a newsletter after first seeing an example.

Who should venture where one has not blogged before? No one wants to be a lemming (I would hope). How do you decide whether or not to set up a blog? The answer isn't black or white (what did you expect?). Ask these questions:

• Can you regularly update it—at least five times a week?
• Do you have something to say other than just linking to others?
• Do you read other blogs or feeds?
• Can you provide information of value to others not just to yourself?
• How large is your newsletter subscriber list?
• How many unique visitors do you get on an average day, week or month?

The big decider is whether or not you can write in the blog almost daily. The people behind the high traffic blogs post multiple times a day. Though resourceful, merely linking to other sites doesn't give visitors much reason to make the effort to come to yours. Reading other blogs or feeds is a great way to learn how to carry a discussion. Find other blogs covering topics similar to yours and check them out. Disagree with their opinions? Write about it and explain your reasons. Cross-blog discussions are common, and that's where trackback comes in handy.

Trackback is a blog feature. If you decide to comment on another blog posting in your blog instead of in that blog's comments page, then you link to the conversation through the trackback link. Trackback is similar to the permalink, the permanent URL for the blog entry, but it has a different URL for copying and pasting in your blog's trackback box.

Aside from the technical aspects of operating a blog on a daily basis, subscriber list size and Web site traffic are good indicators of what kind of reaction you'll get when opening a blog. Starting from scratch with little traffic means you have a long road ahead and lots of work to do. There is no magic formula anyone can sell you for $97 to make your blog an overnight success. But with some perseverance and ingenuity, your blog can engage many prospects and clients.

Pick a niche. Considering there are numerous blogs out there, pick a niche topic when starting a blog for a better shot at attracting and keeping an audience. meryl's notes focuses on three areas: webby, geeky and wordy. In reality, this is too much. What I need to do for my readers is create three separate blog entry points, so those interested in writing, newsletters and Internet marketing get nothing but the wordy entries. Those interested in Web design get the webby stuff and the technophiles receive the geeky content.

I also manage a personal blog separate from meryl's notes. It's about cochlear implants and deafness. This could fall under the geeky category, but it's a personal blog and doesn't belong in meryl's notes. This blog is written for a different audience.

The blogging tools for both of my blogs come with syndication capabilities so those using feed readers or aggregators can read the content through the software. For an explanation of syndication and feed readers, refer to What Is This RSS, XML, RDF, and Atom Business? When sending a new issue of a newsletter, comment on it or link to it in the blog, that way the blog and feed readers will get the goods, so all three bases are covered.

Blogs in disguise use the same tools. Blogging tools aren't just for, well, blogging. Such tools are an excellent way to help you update your Web site more often than you otherwise would. I use it to manage the list of tableless Web sites. Using blogging tools is much easier than the way I managed it before, updating the HTML files by hand. Though using a blog tool, it isn't a blog. In this case, the blog tool has become a content management system (CMS).

Small business owners don't have a need for the fancy and pricey CMSes out there. They find it easier to use blogging software to manage their sites or hire someone to adapt the tool for their site. Women's Spirituality is one such site. Karen Casey may not use the blog, but she does have discussions surrounding the articles she writes.

Blogs have found a place in businesses and people are finding creative ways to use them. Some companies have a blog on the intranet for communicating project status, jeopardies and metrics. They're used for knowledge management. With information pouring in, blog tools provide a way to share, organize and process the information.

Being a follower can be good or bad. No one wants to walk off a cliff with the lemmings, but everyone wants to succeed. Best practices won't help, since the decision to blog is based on the organization's mission, needs and goals along with its target market's desires and needs. A blog about lemmings? There is one, sort of. Or maybe you'd like to start your own and talk about dumb business moves.

About the author: Meryl K. Evans, Content Maven, is the editor of eNewsletter Journal and Shavlik's The Remediator Security Digest. She writes columns for PC Today, InformIT, and MarketingProfs.

Miscellaneous Maestro Minutia

It's official, there will be a new Web Maestro office in the Toledo area in the coming month. (Yep, Ohio.) We will also likely be opening an office in Jackson (downstate Michigan) in the near future. Exciting, chaotic times!

Our Web Maestro user account feature on our website is nearly completed, which will allow you to log in and view your account information - billing and contact information, hosting account, domain name account, payments made, etc. If you don't already have a username and password, those will be generated and sent by email. You can also email or call to request login setup.

That's it for now, thanks for reading! Please feel free to let me know what you find useful or what you'd like to see us cover in future issues.

Sincerely,
Nathan Lyle
Phone: (906)228-5884
Email: nathanlyle@upwebmaestro.com
Website: www.webmaestro.biz
Blog: www.webmaestro.biz/blog

Business Tip

Drive a Nice Car!

By "nice" I don't mean a limo, just something that's not a clunker and also not a fancy "look at me I have money" car. If you drive a decently in-shape vehicle, put your business logo and contact information all over it. Have vehicle graphics professionally designed and installed, and it's likely to be the best advertising investment you'll make. Most advertising companies (TV, radio, etc.) will tell you that ad frequency is what counts. Repetition. They're right, but you'll get more bang for your buck with your car or truck. (Just make sure you don't cut people off when you're driving, or they'll be able to call you up to complain.)