No one reads my Blog!

No one reads my Blog - Is this you?

Recognise the scenario?
You've spent endless hours writing your blog, going back and forth over the wording, re-writing bits, spell checking, saving and publishing, then logging back in again because you forgot to include something.

Yes? No?

Is this you?

Was it worth it?
Then, after all your hours sat typing at the keyboard (at a rate 18.5 words per minute and a 66% accuracy) you wonder if you should have spent your time doing something more productive? After all, who is going to read it? And what good will come of it?

Note: For this and other Hive@Mansfield blogs, clicking on an image will enlarge it.

How many statements do you agree with?

• Blogging is timely
• The rate at which I type is slow
• I make endless mistakes with grammar and spelling
  
• It takes an age to format my pictures and get them "web ready"
• After all my effort - no one reads my Blog!

So why do so many people blog?

Why do they think its such a great way of marketing?

After 2 hours of blogging effort, three people read my blog and no one acts on it.

Have I just wasted two hours of my valuable time?


The core issue!
There's a number of actions that you could take to resolve some of the negatives of blogging - but lets deal with the core issue - not enough people are reading your blog.

If more people read it, you'd get more comments, you'd get feedback, enquires, customers, sales!


How to get more people reading your Blog - (Exposing your blog to the masses)

If you haven't done so already, I strongly recommend you PING YOUR BLOG!

People all around the world are building websites - you've seen them, you click on a link and then get a web page full of advertising and no content! This does nothing to alleviate your frustration, and the next site you look at is just the same - all the links and no content!

All of those people building such sites have not yet discovered the power of RSS Feeder Services.

RSS Feeder Services (otherwise known within Internet Media Sectors as Content Aggregation Services) allows a website owner to source blog articles that match his or her site content and automatically pull the RSS Blog Feeds directly into their site either for free or for a charge. So where do they source such content and who is collecting this content and how?


Blog Ping Services & Servers
Blog pinging is the process of sending your blog to a third party provider and utilising their services for exposing your blog to all those empty websites out there. Technically - they convert your blog article into an XML RSS compliant format (if it's not already) and then provide the blog to organisations needing blog content.

Blog Servers harvest millions of blogs each day and make them available for website owners to subscribe to via RSS Subscription Services. Verisign (The world renowned Web Security Service) handles billions of blogs from around the world.

























How to Ping your Blog
A Blog Ping can be done in two ways - manually or automated.

Some blog providers allow you to configure your blog to be automatically sent to ping servers they have nominated (see your blog help files for info on how to configure this option); However, the servers they choose to ping may only give your blog limited exposure, so there's a great deal of advantage for you if you manually ping your blog too.

When you manually ping a blog you can ping it to one Blog Server or to many Blog Servers.

Here's how to manually ping your blog

1. Find a Blog Ping Server
2. Enter in your blog information
3. Click on the submit button

It's quite easy to find Blog Ping Services - Go to your favourite search engine and type in Blog Ping or blog pinging, Blog Ping server or something similar.

Here's a few popular services which we have used recently to promote the Hive@Mansfield Blog - Simply follow these links and enter in your Blog information as required. Remember to go back to them each time you update your blog.

Web log and Feed Manager from Verisign

Ping My Blog - My favourite - it pings lots of servers, and gives you real time feedback on the ping success

Blog Digger

Ice Rocket

Technorati

Now, with the aid of these Blog Pinging services may be your blog will start to be read by more and more people and hopefully this will impact on your business prospects and sales too!

To get an idea of how Verisign are marketing "Real Time Publishing Services" to Internet Sectors click here to watch their promotional flash introduction.

How you can get your hands on FREE RSS Content Feeds.
If you have a website that lacks quality content, and yet you don't have the time to publish it yourself then you can now get RSS Content Feeds for FREE from a range of Real Time Publishers.

Verisign, recently purchased Moreover and they now offer a wide range of RSS Feeds organised by Categories. Check out the list to see how you could add content to your website for free. Please Note: Moreover free feeds are for individual, non-commercial use only!

Good Luck.
If you have enjoyed reading this blog or if it's been useful to you - please leave a comment below.

Viral Marketing through Google User Maps

We've already shown you how to post your business on Google Business Maps so that people can find you.

Now with the help of Google's "User Maps" you could create your own map overlays in Google Maps and creatively promote your business, your clients and your suppliers too.

This Blog will help you understand how you could creatively use Google User Maps and also introduces Viral Marketing to you through example.

Note: for this and other blogs, clicking on an image will enlarge it.

Typically, every business has four key groups - Suppliers, Customers, Associates (By which I mean Professional Groups, Trade Bodies etc.) and lastly your Competitors. I've not shown Competitors on the diagram below as for the purpose of this blog post, I have excluded them.


























My example demonstrates how I have promoted a number of websites I own through landmarks and places of interest in and around Alfreton, Derbyshire.

Before I go on, let me first explain about Viral Marketing. It's a term used often nowadays but not always understood.

Viral Marketing is a fancy name about the factoring of numbers in electronic marketing - thats all!

For example, you create a video on You-Tube and someone bookmarks it in Facebook or adds it as a favourite in their You-Tube account profile for others to see. The concept of Viral Marketing is simple - You link to or promote an item once and draw other people in to click on and to link to that item. One action from you, can result in hundreds of other actions - a simple modern equivalent is an email chain letter.

Viral marketing can be best illustrated by a simple diagram...

X

X X X X

X X X X X X X

Anyway, you get the idea!

Back to the example - The websites I wish to promote are all about things and people in the Alfreton Area. The two sites I am promoting are Alfreton Wiki and Alfreton History

Alfreton Wiki is a new site which is being developed. As a Wiki site, I need to get lots of people (who are interested in the subject) to visit the site and contribute information to it. The site will grow as more content is added and I simply don't have enough time to do the work myself.

Alfreton History Site is a similar new project, which requires user contributions too.

Heres what I did.

First of all, I went to Wikipedia and made some entries regarding external sites (i.e. Hyperlinks back to my sites) to a number of articles about Alfreton History - knowing that people looking for historical information, genealogy and the like would find Wikipedia as a reliable source of information and reference. I did this to primarily improve the ranking of my site as it is quite new.

I then went around Alfreton Town and photographed lots of landmarks, buildings, businesses etc. Built my Wiki site, created new pages for lots of different entities and uploaded the photographs.

My next step was to create my Google "User Map". Let me point out that a Google "User Map" is different from a business map entry. It's basically a map overlay, which you and others can contribute content to (incidentally - Your map can be exported and shown on Google Earth!).

Under the username of Alfreton Fellowship - I created around 130 entries then named my User Map Alfreton Derbyhire. You can of course, create as many maps as you like.

One of the great things about making maps is experimenting with the icons you get to use as map placement markers - you can even create your own icons if you like!

Anyway, I digress, having created each placement, I then used the rich text option to create hyperlinks back to my Alfreton Wiki Website. I still have lots of editing to do, so here's an example that's near to completion.

Go to Google Maps, then type in "Alfreton War Memorial" in the search bar, the first result should be as shown below in my illustration (Item "A").





















I like the fact that this item shows first in this instance and also that my Map Marker is shown in blue and not in red like the other business map entries! It stands out quite well and I am sure many people would click on it in favour of the other listing entries.

When you are making your map marker placements, you can edit them in plain text, rich text (thats the option I chose) or HTML. If you want to get funky, you can add images and You-Tube videos into the marker placements.

I added some text to my Alfreton War Memorial marker (which is generic for all the markers I made), then editing it using the "Rich Text" format option allowed me to easily add a very specific hyperlink back to the Alfreton War Memorial entry in Alfreton Wiki. See below...
























The link then takes people direct to the Alfreton Wiki Website - job done. My job now is to go to all the other items on the map, create the back link to the Wiki site and the history site too. Whats great about user Maps is that you can generate requests to ask other people to contribute to your map. That puts you in charge and delegates your workload too!

Applying this to your business.

Lets go back to our model of the business - Competitors, Clients, Suppliers and Associates.

You may not want to create a map of your competitors, however mapping your clients and your suppliers and your associates may be beneficial to you - its up to you.

Imagine that you are a member of Derbyshire Notts Chamber of Commerce or E-Business Club
and you wanted to promote your association with them on your map - great!

Thousands of other people will be looking for them too and if they find them via your user map then great - but thats not enough. Lets suppose that each of your marker placements went back to a specific page on your website about them - that would be more than great - it would be terrific!

This principle could be applied to your website for all your suppliers, clients and associates and the more popular they are, the more likely you can feed traffic from Google User Maps back to your business! Fantastic!

























I hope the above example has been a good illustration of viral marketing, but more importantly inspired you all to make creative use of Google User Maps.

Enjoy the journey, and remember, if you need help with anything in this or other blogs, please come into the hive@mansfield for support and advice.

Good Luck. If you have enjoyed reading this blog or if it's been useful to you - please leave a comment below.