A blog is online journal, published frequently (often daily). Each journal entry is called a “post”, and the posts are maintained in reverse chronological order; that is, the most recent is first. The word “blog” itself is a derivative of “web log”. The blog also supports comments and feedback from it readers, enabling it to potentially be a highly interactive form of communication with a global community.

Some of the reasons for blogging include:

• The blog allows you to respond dynamically to your vision. It’s easy to post and manage the contents of the blog with only a minimum of experience. No programming experience is needed. You are authoring and publishing at near-zero cost.
• The blog enables you to build trust and relationships with your clients (or readers).  It is a way of servant leadership. Business leaders today have learned how to use blogs to talk to their customers and to turn those conversations to serious business relationships. You can use your blog to serve your customers.
• The blog establishes your authority in the area of your expertise.
• Blogs, as a part of your social networking, provide a high level of search engine optimization when they are done right. There is a running joke among serious bloggers (Your competitors don’t want you to know this) that BLOG stands for Better Listings on Google. That is a true statement.

If you are trying to decide whether to blog or not, here are some issues you need to consider:

1. Do you have the time? Blogging and the related social networking are very time consuming. Bloggers often post one or more times daily in the one or more blogs they own and also post in Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and other networks. Their posting content involves time-intensive research.
2. Do you have a passion for your vision?  If the passion is there, those that read your blog will know it – and the opposite is also true. Are you willing to make the commitment for the research, writing, support, and all the peripheral work involved to make the vision work? Do you really believe in your vision, service, or product?
3. Do you have the knowledge? One goal here is to establish yourself as an authority on your subject. If you find yourself weak here, it shouldn’t be too serious a concern as you start. If the passion is there, you should be able master a subject in a relatively short time – at least know considerably more than most of your clients.
4. Do you have the necessary awareness of the new marketing paradigm using the blogs? If you don’t have this awareness, you will turn your readers off very quickly. This isn’t like television or magazine advertising.

In the old days a typical marketing phrase for success was “location, location, location”. Today it is “blog, blog, blog”. And your audience is global. The blog has become so important that people often just set up a blog and skip installing a static web site. You really need both.

Here is the basic game for most serious people using blogs and web sites. First, make massive use of the social networks: Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace and more. Use at least some of these for quick, short, regular, and if possible daily postings. Use advertising sparingly, but tease their interests and draw them into your blog. Use quotes, inspiration, humor, and personal stories in the social networks with very short postings. In between, you are David with a slingshot aiming at their niche and need. Once in your blog, use your postings with content and stories – then call them to action. If that’s new for you, why not let Carl help you with your blog?

We just finished battling an editing problem in WordPress, only to discover the problem was with Microsoft software, not WordPress. Praise God for open source software. Boo Microsoft. Here’s the basic strategy for blog problems:

1. If you have recently modified the WordPress code or settings, remove the code or restore the former settings first and see if this fixes the problem. Always start from your most recent change or system modification. Also, verify your host hasn’t made any changes, such as moving your site to another server.
2. Check answers in the DOC files at http://www.worldpress.org. (This generally won’t help much.)
3. This step involves using the WordPress forum. But first: this step is like this: Back up WordPress database -> Upgrade WordPress as necessary -> go to the forum ->check for previous postings on your problem -> Post your problem. Before doing anything else you need to back up your WordPress database. I added the plugin DBC Backup. It runs automatically every evening. Run it before tinkering with WordPress. Remember your postings are in a MySQL database. Copying your WordPress software is not a backup. You need to backup the database in addition. That’s where all your postings are located. The plugin backs up only the database. After backing things up, go into WordPress and update your version if necessary. Your Dashboard will tell if what version you have and if another is needed. If necessary, click the link to update and it will start. Forum people don’t like to talk to you unless you are using the latest version. On the forum, first search to see if your problem is there and resolved already. If not, post your problem.
4. While waiting for forum answers, disable all WordPress plugins. See if the problem is resolved. If so, activate the plugins again, one at a time, until the problem returns. Some plugins can interfere or can even be malware.
5. If the problem is still there, change to the default theme and see if the problem is still there. If the problem is resolved, the issue is in your new theme.
6. Try your blog on another browser. If the problem goes away with another browser (such as Firefox), the problem is with the browser. Our problem was with Internet Explorer 8 and went away when we went to Firefox. Don’t call Microsoft on that. They’ll tell you it is an IE8 addon you are using. Microsoft won’t take the fall. I don’t have any addons. (Hooray for open source software like WordPress and Firefox. Boo for Microsoft and other companies that make you pay for a new copy of your software when they update Windows. They require you to purchase a new copy – not an update. Both Adobe and Microsoft pull that trick. )
7. If you still have an unresolved problem in WordPress, try your blog on another computer. If it works there, check out your computer – run a virus/spyware checker and register cleaner as a start.

Then there is always the master guru, grand wizard, and dragonslayer at http://www.netadventures.biz.

Adding a blog to a web site is almost essential for a web site today. For most of our clients, we can add a blog to your web site for almost nothing – a small installation charge is all that is necessary.

Here are some tips, however, to enable that blog to give you that major visitor traffic that you want.

1. Define the purpose for your blog. What do want your blog to accomplish? If you are blogging as part of an organization (business, church, nonprofit), you need to build consensus as to the purpose of the blog in your organization; but your blog writing should be personal.
2. Budget the time to keep the blog updated. Starting a blog and following the other tips here will give you that traffic quickly, but if you get tired and fail to keep it active, traffic will fall off just as quickly. Try to stick to a regular posting schedule.
3. Don’t rush your postings. You’ve just seen a great movie and you want to post on it while the media is hot about that movie. Take a few days to look at your posting. How can you make your post unique? Is the spelling right? Grammar? Did you proofread your post?
4. Give your opinion. People read your post to get your opinion. Give it to them. Don’t be afraid of controversy. That only builds interest and invites comments, getting more interaction. What does your post say about and issue (movie, political issue, book, etc.) that others don’t?
5. Respond to comments. If someone is commenting and interacting with you on your blog, respond to them.
6. Comment in other blogs in your niche. That’s what this social networking is all about. Put links to your site and/or in the comments in other blogs if that blog’s posting relates to the subject of your blog.
7. Be personal. People don’t want to network with an organization, they want to network with people. Be honest, share your opinions. Don’t post as “Administrator”. Post under your name with your personal photo. If you are a blogger on a church site, you will find most GenX and Millennials have much difficulty relating to an institution. The institution of the church has failed them, and these generations also are highly relational. Use your name and not the church’s, but link them to the church web site.
8. Monitor your stats. What postings are getting read? Is visitor traffic going up or down? We provide all of our clients with a free traffic monitor system. See Postrank.com.
9. Stay legal. Don’t copy other people’s stuff. Use lots of links to other people’s stuff, but make your content with these links unique. Be particular careful on copying graphics. Many graphics are copyrighted by image companies.
10. Provide a full fee RSS. That means your RSS sends a full copy of your post to your blog subscribers.
11. Use Twitter as a gateway to post very frequent comments, and occasionally bring them into your blog from your tweets when a blog post is relevant. Use tools like htt://bit.ly to shorten your URLs and tease them in from the Twitter post. As your followers grow on Twitter, you will gain a rich understanding of the personality of each, their needs, and you can blog to your network more effectively. I promise – you will meet some very interesting people.
12. Write to people – don’t write to Google (banging your keyword phrases) or an organization. Your keyword phrases should flow naturally.
13. Don’t use a self-hosting blog such as blogspot.com or WordPress.com. With these you don’t look professional and can’t choose your theme. Also, your security is less.
14. Get a professional theme for your blog. This will cost you some money in all probability; but looking professional makes all the difference in your visitor traffic.
15. Write like your talk. Use your personal vocabulary but be nice, thank people who help you.This adds personality to your blog.
16. Watch your post headlines. Make the headline catchy. Be sure your keyword phrases are there. Tease the reader with the headline.
17. As others link to you, compliment them by linking to them.
18. Don’t blog for money. Remember this is social networking, not selling. An occasional plug for you new book is fine, but lay off the sales stuff or people will leave your blog. If you are a good restaurant, post your recipes. If you are a publisher, tell how to write a good book and get it published.
19. Use lists, bullets, and subheads in your posts. This will give better search engine optimization.
20. Keep your post on-brand. What is the purpose of your blog? Stay on that track.
21. Use an photo in your comments that shows your face or personality. I prefer a facial photograph – not a distance shot or clipart.
22. Drive content from passion. See: http://freelancefolder.com/the-difference-between-fluff-and-interesting-content/.
23. If your post is out to tear something down (political, religious, educationally, health), build a vision of what the vision should be and how to get there. Give the reader vision, hope, and strategy.

One very important blog – if you haven’t found it – is Matt Cutt’s blog. Matt works at Google and has become the primary interface between Google and the SEO community. This is as close as you are going to get to the inside scoop on how Google works. You can find his blog at:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/.

Check it out – search by topic or scan the archives.

A good recent posting is available at:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/infrastructure-status-january-2007/

This describes some of where Google is going in 2007. It’s a little big of technical stuff here, but those supplemental results he mentions are the listings Googe returns when it can’t find enough information on a search in its main database. These are labeled as such in the return from a search. Obviously, that isn’t a good place for your site to be listed. If you are there, it generally means you have a weak image to the search engine (too few links to your site?) or you are doing borderline spamming of the search engines. Matt says it basically means you have low PageRank.

For over a year we’ve been black-listing spam hosts. This has been minimally effective – but some changes are in store to increase the effectiveness of our black list. One guy threatened to sue – until we mailed his spam email to his State Attorney General.

We did have two problems, however.

1. We store the spam hosts for the spam and phish we receive in Microsoft Access, then upload the list dynamically to a MySQL database on our host. Later versions of Access (the shipping product for many years) has a bug in it that prevents this from working. Last January we worked with Microsoft engineers to get this working by switching in a dll from an Access version two levels back. Now Microsoft, with one of their “automatic updates” broke this again. We don’t know when or if this will be fixed. So we give you the list now in a static PDF form that we plan to update on weekends at:
   http://www.creatingnewworlds.org/stopspam.cfm.
   Hackers and Botnets can enjoy this free blacklist of illegal operators for their fun and games!

2. The online tool we use to identify these hosts from the spam went down, probably from an attack from the bad guys. The tool is back up in a primitive form (http://www.samspade.org), so we can start trying to process our backlog with it.

We will also expand the ranking of our spam listing page. We’ve had great success in the past by using the blogs to create a blog swarm and build high traffic levels on pages. We will try that with this spam page listing now to get its traffic up.

If you don’t like this, sorry. The Bush Administration has been given the charge by Congress to stop and fine these guys. Apparently they aren’t doing it. Too many geldings and wimpys in Congress and the Administration. (You probably get to vote next month – vote a lot of these out.) The hosts have been treating this like a joke. That leaves it up to the users to stop it.

Join us in this war. Create your own black list and circulate it in through the spam blog comments to the hackers and bad guys. This eventually creates another botnet, but targeted at the bad guys. Get serious.

Adding a good blog to your web site, in many cases, can dramatically increase your web traffic. We’ve seen it work. Let’s look at the strategy here and related costs.

First – the direct costs are almost zero. You can use an open source and free blog such as WordPress for many hosts. It’s also easy to install and use. Support is provided through a forum. You’ll have lots of people trying to spam your blog with unrelated comments, but you can add the free Karma 2 spam filter that takes out almost all of the spam at the host level.

As far as indirect costs – to make a blog work takes time. You’ll see from the strategy here it takes lots of time for both writing the blog and researching to write it.

This author posts in three blogs and comments in others. You may feel that what you have to say can’t have much effect in the cyberspace with over 19 million blogs out there now. Quite the opposite. Let’s take an example how it works. I got ripped off by Vonage, a VoIP company, for over $8,000 dollars when they dropped my business line in transferring it from Qwest. A quick search on Google using “vonage problem” +blog showed they were ripping a lot of people off. Letters to Vonage, Better Business Bureau, FCC, FTC, SEC, Federal Attorney General, and a lot of others had no affect. If fact, it seems the Administration arm of the Federal government has rolled over and died.

As a starter, we put our primary correspondence online with a page on our business web site. Anyone can read and see for themselves how bad the situation at Vonage and the Federal Administration is. Then we scanned Google again and located all those blogs about the problems at Vonage and added our comment to each, with a pointer to our web page. In a short time (no Google sandbox stopping this) we received many emails with others verifying what we had experienced and the traffic on the Vonage web page we created zoomed to the stratosphere. We posted the testimonies people sent us online with our page.

Reports of the problems at Vonage have now been reported in the Wall Street Journal (6/8/2006, page D1), and the stock price has dropped to less that half of the price when the IPO was launched a few months ago. Vonage is dying. It’ll be much like Enron, however, only with less noise. A lot of people will be left holding their losses because the Bush Administration did nothing.

The point here is that one person can create what is known as a blog swarm. The effect snowballs through what is referred to as the tail of the blog. The total traffic in the tail of the blog is far more that that of any major blog that gets those high traffic counts.

Want another example? For years the Southern Baptists has been run by a political force of old wineskins. In June of this year, the Southern Baptist bloggers scored a major victory by getting their candidate to win the election in an upset victory. Check it out. How much change takes place is still up in the air, but the bloggers have started it. There are lots of similar stories. Our blogging e-book has a few more. Get your own copy.

Blogs make your site dynamic, and you’ll see your blog posts showing up in the Google index within days if you already have a strong site. To make it really work, however, you need to visit the other blogs and comment there, pointing to your blog posts and pages.

Two big words of caution, however.

1. Stay on-topic. Over 99% of the comments coming into our blogs are killed at the host and the IPs black listed because they are trying to sell perscription drugs, casino games, and fake rolex watches.

2. Make sure your facts are right and the writting has good grammar and correct spelling. One bad fact can destroy your entire argument.

For more information, see our SEO book.

With a Bush Administratin and Congress that seems owned by te DMA, the business of stopping spam is in your own hands. And yes, it can be controlled. To quote Jim Louderback, Editor-in-Chief at PC Magazine:

We can’t rely on someone else to fix this problem…Although the bad guys are ultimately to blame, each of us, individually and collectively, holds the power to wipe them out. “

First line of Defense

Our host has a spam blocker for all our email. If you host with us, we can provide you with a spam blocker for $10 a year. We also have a spam blocker on our personal system that catches some of the stuff that gets through. If spam or a phish makes it this far, the IP and domain goes into our black list that is at:
http://www.creatingnewworlds.org/stopspam.cfm. This goes to hackers that like to nuke hosts that pass spam. Sometimes (for U.S. hosts), we’ve notified the state attorney general. After all, it is illegal (as a result of the CAN-SPAM act.) To get off the black list, the spammer has to pay us a fine.

There are many black lists out there maintained by various companies and people. There are also servers that send out automatic updates on these lists to those that subscribe to them. Ours is free.

Once you are aggressive on this with your own black list, you better have good protection on your system as the bad guys will target you. You need good antivirus, both hardware and software firewalls, and a good anti-spyware system.

Protecting Your Web Design

Never put your email address on any of your web pages. There are plenty of those bad guys that farm pages to get email addresses off the source code to spam and phish. Use a form for people that wish to contact you. Our contact form is at http://www.netadventures.biz/opmcontact.htm. You can look at the source for this page and see an email address, but it is a virtual address and won’t work. The form processor on the host converts the virtual address to a real address and the form works – and we are protected.

Stopping Blog Spam

After we got 27 blog spams in one hour (we think someone was targeting our blog), we realized we had to do something. We added a really good spam blocker to our blog, and even the bad guys are complementing us. If someone spams our blogs now, they get a warning. If they continue to spam, the blocker gets more aggressive. Moreover, the blocker learns with time and gets better the longer, automatically creating its own black list. It is totally automatic – no work on my part. If you do send a real comment and it gets blocked, use our comment form to let us know. The thing stopped 11 blog spams the first day.
What About You?

If you need help in this for your system, we are available. We can even help you start your own black list. Contact us by phone or email.

Links to your site are important for that web traffic, but are important in two different ways: building search engine traffic and simple referrals.

Search Engine Traffic
A link into your site from a popular site is useful for positioning you well in the search engines if it is a text link and contains important keyword phrases. Redirected and dynamic links, JavaScript links, and links with the nofollow tag won’t help you much if any, for positioning in results. Links from spamming sites won’t help you, and I don’t trust any Flash links to help me. If the linking text coming in (anchor text) is your company name or your name, it won’t help much unless you are General Motors or some other branded text. Links from images won’t help, either. No anchor text with images.

Most directories can’t help much as they either link from your company name or it’s a redirected or dynamic link, with the actual page results determined when the entry is pulled from a database.

What you really want for good search engine positioning is links from trusted popular sites. Links from .gov or .edu sites are good as they are almost always trusted. If you can figure out a trick to get news on CNN or AP, you are going to get lots of traffic.

Referral Links

Links from most directories and blog postings won’t help your position in the search engine results much, but are important because they may have high traffic and can often refer traffic directly to your web site from their link. Anchor text isn’t that important. A few exceptions are directories like DMOZ (free) and Yahoo ($299/year), which give you a trusted link.

Conclusion

So the question really comes down to how you want people to come into your site. If they will be using the search engines, work to get good links from popular and trusted sites with anchor text that has your keyword phrases. If they are coming in directly from other sites or blogs, put a strategy together for getting your traffic in from those. For example, created a blog swarm by interacting with hundreds of blogs and commenting on the related topic, pointing to a related page on your web site.

For getting high traffic, web sites and blogs involve different strategies.

If you are using a web site to sell your ideas, visions, or services you will probably find that most people find your site using the search engines. This means positioning well in the engines on your relevant keywords. This positioning, at least in Google, is primarily controlled by the number of links from quality and relevant sites into your pages. Your basic strategy for high traffic, if your site is designed properly, is to build up these links coming in naturally over a period of time. Our SEO book can give you good strategies for that.

For using a blog, the strategy is different. Your goal is to build a blog swarm, or creating energy in a number of related blogs, that point to your blogs postings or web pages. A blog posting can link to your web pages or another posting or your web pages can link to a posting. The blog has to be dynamic, be edgy (to invite comments). In addition, you have to go out to related blogs and build energy on your topic there. Our blogging book details the strategy here.

Don’t expect to see a high PageRank on a page your blog points to or many other blogs point to it, but do expect to see a lot of traffic. If you have your blog properly installed, when you update it the blog “pings” the blog directories, letting everyone know you’ve updated your blog. Moreover, people can subscribe to your blog and get your updatings. All of this is automatic and dynamic. When you blog, information gets to interested users quickly. Updating a web page means a user gets it on a result page after Google has indexed it again – which can take days or months.

Let’s take an example. We put a page on our web site about some major problems we see with Vonage. Next, we searched on Google for blogs on related topics using phrases such as vonage +”customer support”+ +blog. Next, we uses the returned results to find blogs discussing vonage problems and entered our comments as a part of their discussion, with a link to our page in each comment. We kept going – must have gone to over a hundred blogs and commented. As a result, there is a swarm and the Vonage page on our site is one of our most popular pages. It really doesn’t have any PageRank, as it is almost a gateway page. Yet it has high traffic. There is a caution here. Blog comments should be related to the topic for which they are posted. If you do anything else, it’s consider blog spam

Adding Darcy to our home page and giving her a special Darcy page increased our web traffic initially by 300%. It’s now more like an increase of 200% over early November. Quite a respectable increase.

On our ministry blog, the blog there is really driving the traffic, which has increased by 50% since October. It’s hard to see the corresponding traffic increase on this business blog, as there are over 800 pages on the site and many people come in from other areas of the site. The city crime mapping and charting on this site, for example, is a VERY popular area. There are a lot of external links in the search engines to that area, so we see the resulting traffic.

We can put Darcy or a blog on your own web site. Let us know if you are serious about wanting more web traffic.