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When You Should Not Hire a Blogger

Although we provide professional blogging services, there are sometimes when you really should not hire a blogger and should blog yourself. Here are several examples where you are a more effective blogger than a paid blogger.

  • If your industry is niche specific and highly technical. An example would be an accountant who serves government agencies and wants blogs on government accounting procedures and changes in federal acquisition.
  • If the topics that you blogs done for are more like case studies of actual customers you have worked with on projects. An example would be an Internet security consultant who wants blog posts on procedures and strategies that they have used for a specific client to solve a problem.

Sometimes a professional blogger cannot replace you and the information you have learned and mastered over years of working in your industry. No blogger can get inside your brain and write from an expected level of authority on niche specific, business specific, or customer specific needs.

For cases such as these and others where really you need more “meat” for potential readers, we recommend that our blogger write on general news topics two days a week and that you the “industry expert” write one day a week. This allows for a volume of keywords on-topic posts to be created for you, but provides some in-depth insight that your readers and subscribers will value.

There are still some areas in which we personally as professional bloggers cannot provide services for, or will pass on writing for, but with your participation on your own blog, you can provide real value on difficult to write for topics.

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Investing in an Assistant

If you are a small to medium sized business owner you will understand that downtime is important but very hard to have when you own your own business. You typically cannot shutter your doors and windows when you go on vacation or want to take a weekend off. You can control that you don’t work 24/7, but most business owners will continue to have some degree of contact with the office even when on vacation.

For me, I am getting ready to do some European travel this summer. I will be out 10 days in Paris, France and out two weeks in Russia later in the summer. In both cases I am not expecting to have email or phone contact. So short of closing your business and angering customers what do you do? For me, I am taking my Christmas holiday to train a new personal assistant. Although in one week I cannot do a brain clone, I can set the groundwork with a new assistant to give them the background needed to be able to monitor and answer as many questions as possible in my absence and then continue additional long distance training. I will be training my assistant to do minor AdWords account management tasks and to monitor customer service e-mail and voice traffic.

I am fortunate in that I am already working with the person whom I have chosen to be my personal assistant, but if you do not have the same situation, you may want to consider contacting Kathy Goughenour of Virtual Assistant Training. Kathy has been a personal assistant and now trains others on how to be virtual assistants. She knows her students and can recommend one to you to contact to become your personal assistant on a full-time or part-time basis.

There is no reason in today’s web connected world why a personal assistant cannot monitor phone, email, and business traffic for you from just about any location. If you are feeling too tethered to your own growing business, now’s the time to start planning for your free time by considering training a personal assistant.

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How Do You Know Twitter is Working For You?

Many people like to use Twitter, but more than just tweeting without a plan you really need to put Twitter to work for you. I recommend shrinking all links you use in Twitter with an application that gives you click stats. There is no better way to continue to spend time on Twitter than when you know what you are doing is truly benefiting you.

I use two applications for Twitter link shrinking for my own use and for clients. If I am using Social Oomph for tweet scheduling I also use a bit.ly account to shrink all my links outside of Social Oomph. If I am using HootSuite, I let HootSuite shrink and track my links. I like both applications.

On bit.ly, make sure you just don’t use it to shrink links, but get the value by setting up your own account first. When I use bit.ly I am able to see the number of link clicks web wide and those that my own tweet generated. In HootSuite I see similar information but in a graphical format. Both allow you to see what links where clicked and give you an idea of the viral and traffic generation nature of Twitter.

Once you or a client see the power of the links back to your website as well as to informational topics you’ll be sold on the fact that the time you invest in Twitter has value. So if you are tweet haphazardly and not tracking links, now’s the time to make a change and start measuring what you do on Twitter.

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What is Google Base?

Setting up a Google Base account is the first step you must take to have your items for sale to be shown in Google Products. What exactly is Google Base? Let’s explore that a bit is easy terms.

First here is the link to set up your Google Base account.  When you load your products and you will do this in a very special syntax your products will then have the opportunity to be shown on Google Products pages as well as in the organic results under a listing called Shopping.

Sometimes a pay per click customer will see a competitors item shown with an image in the organic results and think that this is an AdWords vehicle and that if they set up AdWords image ads there images of products will show in the organic results of Google.com, this is not the case. Google Base is unique and another free search vehicle and is not associated with participation in Google AdWords, although Google AdWords text ads may show on the Google Products shopping page but only as text ads.

You can submit your product listing to Google Base as either a tab delimited text spreadsheet or as an XML data feed. I personally like the XML data feed. For more information on the specifics of how to do this and the format, please visit this Google Base information page on data feeds.

Once your feed is created, you will load the feed using FTP to a special location that Google provides. After that it is up to Google if they will show your products, images, pricing and information when it matches a search.

For e-commerce sellers Google Base provides another great way to showcase your products using Google.