Freelance Business Writing

In my previous post I talked about planning your blog before you actually set it up. If you have your editorial calendar and you’re ready to get going, let’s do it.

First, comes the fun part. Every blog requires a title and a description. If you are looking for good search engine results from your blog, try to use keywords in your title. My blog title is not terribly interesting, but “freelance business writing” incorporates my main keywords and makes it clear what my blog is about.

Write a description for your blog too. You will be asked for one when you set up your blog, so you may as well have it ready. I use blogger. com and the description is limited to 500 characters. I imagine it is the same everywhere. The description should explain what your blog is about. My description is short and to the point – “Using words to market your business”.

Once you have a title and description, you need to prepare your first post. Aim for a couple of short paragraphs to introduce yourself and the purpose of your blog. Refer to mine for an example, if you like. I typically write in Word, edit, edit again and then copy and paste into my blog editor.

Now you need to decide where to host this blog. You have 3 options – free hosting on a third party site, hosting on your own site or paid hosting. Conventional wisdom states that hosting your blog on your own site is best when you intend to use your blog for promoting your business. If you already have a site, you can host a blog there. If you don’t, you will need to purchase a domain name and set up your blog on that domain.

I started by with free hosting on blogger.com. I knew that I should be hosting my blog on my own site but, to be honest, I am not a very technical person. I read the instructions for switching my Blogger blog to my own site and couldn’t make much sense of them. I did eventually wise up and made the switch from Blogger to WordPress. More on that in a later post, but suffice it to say, if you want a blog on your site, WordPress is absolutely the way to go.  

But I digress. My blog is not really about the technical side of things. It’s about the content side of blog marketing. Since I am no expert in the area of hosting I will defer to someone who is. This article on blogging offers a good overview and I recommend you read it. You can also click the links at the bottom of that page for access to more articles about blogging.

Your blog host will tell you whether your blog title is available and will instruct you in how to add your description and other relevant details. From there, you can add your first post.

Stay tuned here for some tips on managing your many blog posts.  

Seems that just about everyone has a blog these days. Some are outlets for personal rants, some offer witty comment on the big stories of the day, and some provide valuable information about everything from cooking to high tech gadgets.

There is another use for blogs and many businesses have discovered it - marketing. Like article marketing and social bookmarking, blog marketing costs next to nothing. It offers an opportunity for a business to communicate on a more personal level with its clients. Businesses can use their blogs to keep customers informed about their industry, new innovations in products, and new services. They can also use their blogs to respond to customer complaints or concerns.

Creating a blog, preparing content and posting it can take a lot of time. And once you start, you are committed. Think of the impact on your business’ image if you started a blog and then let it wither and die because you ran out of time to keep up with the posts.

Since this post is about how to start a blog, I would suggest that before you launch your blog, you sit down and think about how you will manage it. Posts need to be frequent and timely. If a big story that is relevant to your business hits the news and you don’t get around to blogging about it for a month, that may not look good to your readers. If your posts are sporadic – once a week for a few weeks, dropping down to once a month for a bit, and then back to weekly – people may lose interest.

Big businesses can often afford to hire a marketing firm or freelance writer to write their blog posts, although many still choose to do it themselves. If you are a small business that cannot afford to outsource your blogging, you need to plan carefully before you even bother to set up your blog.

Begin with an outline of what you want to talk about in your blog. New product announcements, information on how to use your product, innovative uses of your product – all are good options. If you run a service-based business, like me, talk about how and why customers use your service. Tie in prevailing trends. For example, if you run a spa, there are infinite health-related topics you can use. I am a freelance copywriter, so I write blog posts that help small businesses learn how to use copywriting in the online environment to promote themselves.

Once you have a general idea of what you want to cover, draw up an editorial calendar using Excel or some other spreadsheet. List a bunch of topics, including an introductory, why-you-are-writing-a-blog topic, and then put a date beside each. Even if you can only manage to add one new post a month, commit to it on your calendar and stick with it. (Once you get started, you may find it easier than you think and you may be able to post more frequently.) Remember that these are posts, not articles. A couple of hundred words is usually enough, so you don’t need hours and hours to write each one.

Now that you have an editorial calendar, you can start to assign resources to the writing. You do not have to have a single blog writer, although for consistency of voice and tone you may want to. (I’ll talk more about that in a future post).

If you think you can manage your schedule, it’s time to get into the specifics of setting up your blog, which I’ll cover in my next post.

I’ve talked a fair bit about social bookmarking and the benefits it can bring your business. Being an active participant in a social bookmarking site can help draw traffic to your business Website. But social bookmarking is a two-way street. Not only do you want to add items to your bookmarks, you want people to add your blog posts, Website and articles to their list of favourites.

If you read a lot of blogs or newspapers online, you have probably seen a button with the words “Add This” or “Bookmark” and a bunch of symbols. If you have ever wondered what it is for or how you can get one on your site, let me tell you.

Social bookmarking and news sites can provide you with snippets of code to add to your Website or blog. This code creates a button that allows visitors to add your site or blog post to their bookmarks. Trouble is, if you have a del.icio.us button and the visitor doesn’t use that particular service, the button is of no use to them. To save you having to add a button for each possible bookmarking site, the people at Add This have created a single button with options for all of the big sites – del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, Facebook, MySpace and more.

Adding this button is pretty easy for anyone who manages their own Website. Visit http://www.addthis.com/. Click Get Your Button. Select your button from the page that opens. Tell them where you are putting your button and then click Get Your Free Button. Add This provides you with the code you need. Just copy it and paste it into your HTML, wherever you want it to appear. The Add This instructions also tell you that you can add the button to your Website template (if you use one) and have it appear on every page in your site.

If you do not manage your own site, your Website manager can help. If you have some access to the code on your site but feel less than confident in your knowledge of HTML, find a tech-savvy relative or friend to give you a hand.

The Add This button is easy to add to your site and is a great way to encourage visitors to link to you. Give it a try.

If you are new to social bookmarking and plan to use it as a marketing tool, like me, you may know that to take advantage of it you need to add a lot of bookmarks.What you may not know is what you should post. Here are a few suggestions:

Your own Website. This may seem obvious, but your first addition to your bookmarks should be your own site.

Your own blog posts. Each blog post has its own Web address or URL. You can add each one to the social bookmarking site you use.

Your articles. If you have published articles somewhere, you can add each one to your list of bookmarks. When you add your blog posts and articles to your bookmarks you can build your list and, if your posts and articles have links to your site (which they should), you may end up driving traffic to your site.

Bookmarking is not all about you though. You need to enrich your listings by adding interesting items that you come across online. These items should also be relevant to your business. For example, I manage the online marketing for a women’s centre in my community. In the past couple of days I have read articles about women in the energy industry, the local Take Back the Night event and young women and self-esteem. I have added all of those articles to the centre’s bookmarks because I know they will be of interest to their clients.

Social bookmarking sites offer you an opportunity to build your online profile, but if you abuse that opportunity and only post sites that relate directly to your business, your profile may do you more harm than good. Aim for a balanced approach and be a true participant in this very social medium.

Social bookmarking sites are not only fun to participate in, they have also become a valuable marketing tool.

If you plan to use social bookmarking sites for marketing, you need to know what tagging is. Keep in mind that I am referring here to del.icio.us, which is the social bookmarking site I use. I am not familiar with others at this point, but I assume they all operate in a similar manner.

Each item you add to your bookmarks on the social bookmarking site can be tagged. The tags are free-form, which means you can use any term you want. People who view your bookmarks will see the tags you have used. The list of terms will suggest to them the type of business you are in. You can also include these tags on your own Website in a tag cloud or list, which is a great way to build your site’s relevancy for these terms.

When you consider all that I have said in the previous paragraph, you’ll see how important it is to make those tags relevant to your business. Example:

I am a freelance business writer, so I need to use tags that apply to my industry. I recently added an article I wrote on women entrepreneurs to my bookmarks on del.icio.us. I could have tagged this article with many words, but I chose to use the word “business” only. Why? I did not want to highlight terms like “entrepreneur” and “women” in the keywords pointing to my site.

Further, the “tag cloud” on my site makes my services immediately clear to site visitors. Words like copywriting, marketing, and writing make sense there. Words like women and entrepreneur do not really belong.

In addition to planning your tags carefully, you should also plan your bookmarks carefully. Under my business ID I have added a bunch of links to articles and sites about marketing, social media and writing. While I would love to share some cool movie reviews or articles about environmental or women’s issues, they do not fit with my business. Instead, I will create a separate ID for my personal interests and add those bookmarks under that ID.

When you first start with social media marketing, it is easy to get carried away and start tagging everything in site. But you should use social bookmarking wisely, carefully selecting sites and articles that pertain to your business. Save the “fun” stuff for your personal bookmarks page.

As I have discussed in previous posts, social media marketing is a cheap and effective way for businesses to promote themselves. It is especially relevant for small businesses and non-profits, which typically have little or no money in their marketing budget.

Because social media sites are so accessible and plentiful, it may be tempting to jump in with both feet and start posting stuff everywhere. Don’t. Before you start your new marketing initiative, do some research and make a plan.

Research comes first. Investigate the various options out there. Spend some time on social bookmarking sites to see how they work and if they are the kind of site you want to be connected to. Same with social news sites and social networking sites. Check out the kinds of things being posted and the types of comments being made. After you have looked at the main players in each of those categories, select one from each and start there. Remember that there is a social aspect to these sites. You need to participate to reap the marketing benefits and if you are signed up with a bunch of sites, you will never be able to keep up. Include distribution methods in your research too (more on that below).

Second, think about the time you can commit to social media marketing. There are only so many hours in a day. How many of them can you spend reading, reviewing and commenting on news items or blog posts? If you don’t have enough time, maybe you need to narrow your focus to a blog and forget about social news and networking for now.

Third, think about content. If you are planning to use a blog or articles as part of your marketing strategy, you need to be realistic about how much content you can produce in an average month. A blog needs current content that is posted frequently. Consider how many posts you can write in a typical 30-day span. Can you post once a week or once a month? Do you have time to research and write both blog posts and longer form articles? Where will you get topic ideas? Your social media marketing plan should answer all of these questions and define a minimum number of posts so you will know whether or not you are keeping up with your marketing goals.

Fourth, think about distribution. It isn’t enough to just post an article or blog entry once. While you may think that readers will love your stuff and pass it on, that kind of response takes a long time to build, if it happens at all. You will need to give your content a helping hand to make sure it is spread far and wide. Linking your posts to social news sites, tagging them on social bookmarking sites, using RSS feeds – all of these actions are part of distribution, and you need to have a strategy for disseminating your content before you start creating it.  

After you have gotten your feet wet in the social media marketing pool, you can revisit your plan and adjust it accordingly.

Social media marketing is a lot of things – easy, affordable, and fairly effective if done right. It is also a lot of fun. Writing blog posts and bouncing them around the Internet, seeing what other people “digg” and have tagged as favourites – none of this seems like work. And, to be honest, some of it isn’t. Therein lies the danger of social media marketing – the ease with which you can lose focus.

Yes, from a marketing standpoint I should be digging and tagging things that pertain to my business or at least fields related to it – online marketing, article writing, blogs etc. But social bookmarking and news sites have made it so easy to find cool stuff that it’s hard to resist the temptation of say, “The Top 20 Most Influential Rock Producers” or “The Most Obnoxious Tourists in the World”, both recently featured on Digg. Over on del.icio.us, I recently logged in with the express purpose of finding links to good social media marketing sites, and was quickly sidetracked by “Listening Post’s Top 10 Hottest Music Sites”.

All I did was read these posts and that took a lot of time. If I had actually bothered to formulate and write a comment, I would have lost even more precious minutes from my workday.

What should you do if your primary focus on social media sites is marketing and not leisurely browsing and chatting? Well, it isn’t easy, but I would suggest limiting yourself to one bookmarking site and one news site. For simplicity’s sake, I went with two of the biggest – Digg and del.icio.us. Give yourself an allotted time on each site and be disciplined. No matter how intriguing the story on Hellboy or the Dark Knight seems, stay the course. Tag the story for later reading and concentrate your real efforts on links and networks that can help your business.

In my last post I talked in very general terms about what social media marketing is. The key to successful social media marketing is getting involved in the various sites. So, what kinds of sites am I talking about?

First, there are social networking sites. You’ve heard of all or most of the big ones, I’m sure - Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and, more recently, Twitter. As the name implies, these sites allow you to network with other users, anywhere in the world. You set up a profile and add content to build your profile – pictures, video, messaging. I have to admit to being totally new to Facebook – maybe a generational thing – but I do have a profile there. Same with Linked In. Sadly, I have let them languish as I have focused on social bookmarking and news.

Social bookmarking sites allow users to track their favourite Websites and share them with other friends or members of networks they create. Users tag their favourites with a keyword, allowing people to search by tag (i.e. topic). People can also find and link to the favourites of their friends, or people they think have cool taste. Comments enable users to share their opinions with other users, which increases the “social” aspect of the sites. I currently use del.icio.us, but there are many others out there.

Social news/media sites are based on the same concept as social bookmarking sites. They allow users to post news stories, images and video. Like the other sites, users can create networks of friends and add comments about the posts they like, all to encourage conversation about the issues/trends of the day. Two of the most popular I have seen are Reddit and Digg. I have just started using Digg.

As far as using these sites for social media marketing, the most important thing is participation. It is not enough to just post a bunch of your stuff in hopes of drawing traffic. Remember that this is social media marketing. The overriding concept behind social media sites is sharing, so it is critical that you use them to share links to items you find interesting. The marketing aspect comes from selecting items that pertain to your business or industry either directly or indirectly. Once you post something, you need to comment and develop a presence to really get yourself noticed.

Of course, you do want to promote your own content too. In my next post I’ll share the process I have used in my own social media marketing, as I have tried to find a balance between getting involved and sharing my own materials. I think my experience will prove instructive for those considering social media marketing but unsure of how to begin. 

Social media marketing is one of the newer online marketing methods out there. While businesses have been using social networking sites for a while, it is only fairly recently that they have expanded their reach into social bookmarking and social news sites.

Some of you reading will tune out right now. You already know all about social media marketing. But for those of you who, like me, are new to all of this, I’ll try to get you started by sharing what I know and have experienced in my short time using this new marketing method.

There are three main types of social media sites – networking, news and bookmarking. The idea behind social media marketing is to get a presence on these sites - join, link and get connected to potential new customers. You do this by participating regularly in the sites. As an added bonus, you can make inbound links to your Website or blog, which can increase traffic to your site and improve your ranking on Google and other search engines.

What’s more, social media marketing costs nothing, at least directly. There are no fees for joining the big sites. But the indirect costs in time can be a little heavy, especially at first. If you are a small business owner, like me, it can be challenging to find the time to get familiar with the sites, post things to the sites, and respond when comments start coming in. It can also take a fair amount of time to create your own content (blog posts and articles) to link to these sites. 

So I hope that in my next few posts I can help you figure out a strategy for understanding social media marketing and for getting started. Next up – a description of the sites, followed by a process you may want to use to get the ball rolling.

In previous posts I talked about article marketing and generating ideas for articles, but coming up with topics is only half the battle. Writing is the next challenge. While you may be able to fill a page of content, there are some things you should keep in mind to make your article a truly effective marketing tool. 

Most search engine marketers will tell you to use keywords in your articles. Put them in headings, links, and in the body. All good advice, but there is more you need to know.

Remember that your articles should serve two purposes. On the one hand, they should build links to your site. On the other, they should help build your brand and reputation. With those objectives in mind, be sure your articles: