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Best of 2008 – 11 Tips for Getting Readers for your Business Blog

readerpedrosimoes7You’ve set up a blog for your business and started writing.  Now, how do you get readers?

  1. Content, Content and more Content – Did I mention content?  The only way to attract and keep readers is with great content.
  2. Share – You started a business because you have some specialized expertise.  Share that expertise with your readers.  They will respect your efforts and look to you for advise.
  3. Consistency – Readers need to know that there’s a reason to check back from time to time.  Choose a posting schedule and try to stick with it.  Ideally, you should be posting at least once a week.
  4. Stay on Target – While straying off the path occasionally is ok, readers generally expect you to post on a certain subject matter (whatever your expertise is).  You may want to keep a personal blog for other posts (remember you’re representing your business).
  5. Listen & Respond – Encourage readers to interact with you through comments and email.  Listen to what they say and respond intelligently.  Your blog should be a place to have a conversation with your customers.
  6. Be Helpful – Related to #5, anywhere you see a question you can answer, answer it.  Help people out with problems and concerns, not just on your blog, but anywhere you see people post their issues.  If it’s something you can write about on your blog, you’ll also help out others who may have the same problem.
  7. Market – Add links to your blog on your website, your business card, your brochures, your email signature, and anywhere else you can.  You’ll need to let customers know that you have a blog.
  8. Be Social – Join social networks and socialize with the members.  Most social networks will also allow you to link to your website and blog.  Some will even automatically import posts from your RSS feed.
  9. Blogosphere – Read other industry blogs and comment on their posts.  Link to posts you think your readers would be interested on.  Write opinions about posts on your own blog.
  10. Keywords & SEO – Don’t go overboard trying to get keywords into your posts, but do take good SEO practices into account.  Knowing the keywords you want to target can help you incorporate them into your posts.
  11. Patience – It takes time to grow a readership on a blog.  It can take over a year to get a decent following, so don’t expect your blog to take off right away.  It takes a regular commitment to great content and a lot of patience.

(photo by pedrosimoes7 @ Flickr CC)

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Best of 2008 – Which Social Networks Are Best for Promoting Your Business Content?

One way to increase the awareness of your products and services (and your brand) is to have your website and/or blog content show up on social networking sites such as Digg, Newsvine, Del.icio.us, etc.  Users of these social networks will hopefully discover your useful content and visit your site – possibly becoming returning visitors and passing on your name to co-workers, family and friends.  Social networking sites usually have different types of audiences, so it is worth investigating them to see which ones work best for your target visitors.

Here is an summary of some of the top social networking sites:

  • Digg – Started initially in the tech industry as a way to link and rank news and articles and has quickly spread to gaming, and off-the-wall.  Digg is trying to widen their audience, but in my experience, many business-related articles are quickly lost in their huge amount of submissions.
  • FaceBook – Started as college students only, but now open to all.  Best for connecting with long-lost friends and for networking with acquaintances.  There are business networks and groups, but FaceBook does not make it easy to separate close friends with business networking acquaintances.  One possibility is to create two personas – one for work and one for personal use.  Posts from your blog can be displayed in your profile and you can create pages to promote your business.
  • MySpace – Probably one of the more mainstream of the social networks, MySpace is heavily used by younger generations and by entertainment and music groups wanting to connect with their fans.
  • LinkedIn – Targets business users who want to keep track of their networking contacts.  Business can join and create groups to promote themselves.
  • Del.icio.us – Is a link sharing social network where you can share links with notes and tags.  Can be useful across multiple industries and a nice way to add more content to your own blog/site (check out their widgets).
  • Technorati – Started as a way to view news on tech blogs (hence the name) and see their ranking (as a function of how many other tracked blogs link to them) – is now used across many industries for an overview of what’s going on in the blogosphere.
  • StumbleUpon – Has a fairly general audience who use the site to ’stumble upon’ new content that others have submitted.
  • Newsvine – Started as a sort of portal with voting for content from news organization, it now accepts content from anywhere, but still heavily favors news websites.  May be worth a look for your business blog since you can also start your own column on the site.
  • Sphinn – Targets Search & Internet Marketing Professionals.

As mentioned previously, it is also worth taking a look at industry websites to see if there are smaller niche social networks and communities in your own industry.

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Best of 2008 – Ruby one-liners get answered

rubymegyarshThe guys over at Rails Envy, a Ruby on Rails enthusiast podcast, have a running joke.  Their catch phrase? – ‘Rails can’t scale.’ Yeah, I wasn’t too sure I got the joke either.  Then I heard it myself in CIO level discussions from smart business people parroting things they didn’t understand and read somewhere once in an article in a magazine bylined by a guy in a suit who looked corporate and trustworthy.  Rational reasoning and discourse can sometimes be co opted by bumper-sticker wisdom even at the highest levels.

Here is the thing about corporations; enterprises are in the business of managing calculated risk within the market or industry they operate.  They do this by forcing non-core operations to be conservative, risk-adverse and predictable.  It’s a bit like hedging your business’s bet in the junk bond market (core business) by backing it with rock solid, non sexy T-Bills (non-core like software development).  Sure, the return on the T-Bills is lousy but you know in three years you won’t be out that investment.  Java, backed by Sun Microsystems, and .Net, backed by Microsoft, are some of the blue chip securities of the programming world.  Enterprises trust them.  One-liners like ‘Rails can’t scale’ are the one-handed brushoff of entrenched corporate IT’ers to the mere idea of using something new like Ruby or Rails.

Still, Ruby is a persistent pitch man, especially in the web technologies.

Corporate IT: Ruby uses green threads and Rails is single threaded, why are we even talking?

Ruby: Ruby’s MRI is green threaded, but the JRuby interpreter uses native threads in the JVM, just like Java.  Also, Rails 2.2 just released 2.2 RC1 that is thread safe.  Merb was thread safe from the start and just released 1.0 RC2.

Corporate IT: There aren’t enough ruby programmers to staff a project.

Ruby: The Rails Rumble contest didn’t have any problems finding entrants.  Five hundred programmers just gave up a weekend to write 248,000 lines of code. Teams up to four completed 131 different Rails projects in under 48 hours, so you can see just how productive a small group can be in Ruby.

Corporate IT: Sorry but we need dependable database connectivity, not this serial locking business.

Ruby: So pooled connections in jruby and Rails 2.2 scratch that itch?

Corporate IT: There still isn’t a big company backing it so no support.  No support, no chance bub!

Ruby: Have you ever actually called Microsoft about a .Net problem?  Or maybe Sun to support your Java app?  Maybe you have, or at the very least arranged a support contract with a .Net or Java consulting company.  Try instead one of the fine Ruby consulting companies like EdgeCase, HashRocket or ThoughtWorks.  Sun already bankrolls the JRuby guys and for the Softies out there, Microsoft is putting its wallet behind Ruby on the CLR.

Corporate IT: Books?

Ruby: New one every day.

Corporate IT: You’ll get me to use some text editor in place of my IDE when Heck freezes over.

Ruby: Not a problem.  NetBeans guy, Eclipse, or IntelliJ?

Corporate IT: Yeah, okay, you win.  Now can I have that stack of waterfall project specs back, they were holding up the table at that end.

Ruby: Have you ever considered Agile?

Photo attributed to Megyarsh @ Flickr CC