Blogging for your Internet business is one surefire way to boost the visibility of your products and services. Here are a few ways to boost your internet advertising with the help of a blog:

1. Make your clients or customers abreast on your website’s alterations. Your new products and affiliate websites could also be announced through your blog. For example, a car dealer network (No, I’m not going to comment about recent recalls from a particular car company) could communicate the progress it is making on alterations(!) or special offers. For a sales force Business podcasting could inform sales reps / agents of special offers or even a motivational speech to urge the team on to achieve targets.
2. Keep track of your business objectives and plans through open writing. Your blog content can be easily stored through archives. What could be better than searchable information that could be easily accessed by anyone browsing the web, right?
3. Air your opinions, advice or reviews on specific services or products that are related to your business. Publishing is a very easy process with blogging.
4. Ensure that you respect your competitors by not slating them!
5. Include links that will fetch back links and subsequently improve your ranking on search engines. This could be better executed through putting well-written articles in your website. Affiliate links could also be included in your blog to earn more extra income.
6. Collect response through the ability of blogs to fetch comments from your blog readers. You can learn and improve your products and services through with the feedback from your readers.
7. Connect easily with other bloggers. When other bloggers notice that you have something good in your blog, they will put you in their favourite lists that will automatically link you to their blogs.
8. You can use your blogroll or front page link to help you ensure the latter.
9. Recently, I read that the content of your website should consist of at least 60% (in relation to) what you sell (services and products). Blogging should help you communicate more about your brand and value you can give
10. Get your clients involved by communicating case studies

In summary, communicating your business through a blog and corporate podcast can improve dialogue both internally (corporate/charity/organisation’s mission) and externally, to your clients getting a good feeling about your confidence  to provide them with excellent service.

So what is it that stimulates the flow of incoming blog traffic, keeps these visitors returning and encourages their comments and interacting?

Here are the 5 major ‘components’ of a blog that helps breathe life into and keeps it popular.

Consistent Blog Posting

Make no mistake if you do not consistently post to your blog it will be as deserted as any beach in the middle of winter. Maintaining a regular pattern of blog posting will allow your readers to know what to expect or even if they can depend on you for any future updates. The more you post the greater the chance that you will be abler to develop a popular blog amongst the readers of your particular niche.

Quality Content

Now the first step is consistent blog posting but just as important is whether your updates will be of any interest to the readers. The quality of the content you add to your blog needs to be something visitors new and old appreciate enough to keep returning. Posting just anything will not ‘cut the mustard’ if you want people to keep coming back.

Keep your content relevant, thought provoking, informative, humorous or whatever it takes to keep the interest of your readers. Over the long term this is what makes for a popular blog.

Allow and Respond to Comments

Always remember your blog is a social community or you at least want your readers to feel that way. With that said it is absolutely mandatory that you allow comments on your site. If visitors do not have that option you have taken away the ’spirit’ behind what a blog is all about. All you will have left is a ‘website’ that happens to be updated more frequently.

Along these lines when readers post comments take the time to look at them. They will tell you what is on the readers’ mind and can give you more direction as far as to what type content is most appealing to them. There will also be comments that may require your response therefore respond accordingly and help to foster an atmosphere where commenting is encouraged and people feel involved.

Appropriate Template

The template you choose should fit the mood you are trying to establish and the objectives you are trying to achieve.

If you are blogging for business your template should be more professional or at least reflect the business itself. On the other hand if your intentions are for fun your template needs to project that attitude or mood as well.

About You

Do not leave this page blank since it is your chance to introduce yourself to the visitors. Readers’ new and old readers are always interested in knowing something about the person whose work they are viewing. This also helps to breed a little more familiarity with visitors thereby giving the blog a more ‘comfortable’ feel.

Your bio should be brief of course and should contain things such as why you blog and any other information that may be relevant to the blog theme.

Adding a picture is also helpful unless you are currently a member of the witness protection program and if that is the case a suitable avatar will work just fine.

When creating a blog you will obviously want it to be successful since you will likely be investing your time and effort into it. As we mentioned previously most popular blogs have plenty of blog traffic along with visitors who post comments regularly. If you use traffic and commenting as a measure of a blogs success the 5 components we discussed above will help you get plenty of both. Now there may be other more subtle goals that you can target with your blog but having a broad popularity is always a good start.

Article Source

You can:

• Add google buzz button to your blogspot.

Use:

• Google buzz -keyboard shortcuts

Shift+l – like a message
m – mute (ignore) a conversation
r – add a comment

• Subscribe to a Google Buzz account in a feed reader

Google Buzz’s search feature shows the latest public messages that match your query.

Some useful searches:

• Hide Google Buzz counter

Google Buzz’s search feature shows the latest public messages that match your query.

Some useful searches:

author:@gmail.com – find all the messages written by a specific user (you can also use a partial name instead of an email address)

commenter:@gmail.com – find all the messages that have a comment from a specific user

has:photo, has:video, has:link – restricts the results to messages that include photos, videos or links (for example: vancouver has:photo)

source:flickr, source:twitter, source:reader- restricts the results to messages imported from Flickr, Twitter, Google Reader (for example: vancouver source:flickr)

• View Google Buzz photos in a slideshow

When you upload photos to Google Buzz, they’re added to Picasa Web Albums. If you click on a thumbnail, Google Buzz will open a lightbox to help you quickly navigate between images. Unfortunately, there’s no option to view the images in a slideshow, but Picasa Web Albums has this feature and there’s a small link that opens the photo album. Click on “view all” and you can select the slideshow option, export photos using Picasa or print photos.

Read more about Blogger buzz tips and tricks

With regard to the latter, when you start writing your blog posts it is important that you find keywords that will make it easier for your target audience to locate your content! This can easily be done using free keyword research tools.

However, what is more important is that you do it right! There are certain rules you need to follow when optimizing your blog content!

Rule 1: Don’t Overdo It!

Although the search engines do use keywords, among other things, to decide how a page should rank they don’t just rank the page with the most keywords the highest. The people working on the algorithms the search engines use are actually quite clever and they realize that people will just try to take advantage of this. That’s why you need to go with a keyword density that is no higher than 2.5%!

Rule 2: Use Your Main Keyword As Close To The Beginning Of The Title Of Your Blog Post As Possible!

The title of your page is very important to the search engines. For that reason it is important to put your main keywords close to the beginning if the article.

Rule 3: Never Let Keywords Ruin Your Content!

It can be tempting to flood your blog post with keywords. Don’t!

Doing so will not only make the post unreadable, but as mentioned in rule 1 the search engines will pick up on it. As important as keywords are to get your content recognized you should never sacrifice the quality of your content. It will only come back and hit you like a boomerang!

Rule 4: Above All Else Focus On Quality!

We talked a bit about it in rule 3, however, the importance on quality cannot be exaggerated! It might be possible to lure first time visitors to low quality content, but in the long run your blog will be far better served by providing only the highest level of quality. This rule applies not only to blogging websites, but to all websites!

Rule 5: Don’t Overdo It!

This is exactly the same as rule 1, but it’s so important that it’s worth mentioning as many times as possible.

Finding keywords that will boost your blogs search engine rankings is something you should always do to increase your blogs business potential. However, do make sure that you don’t overdo it!

With an increase in use of the Internet by clients and an emphasis of new media, there is no better time to discover how interactive approaches, digital marketing and effective corporate communication can help further develop your business and online presence.
Please click here to view the full course coverage.

On-line booking / Registration is now open at:

http://www.khlinteractive.com/book-now or directly via the Registration page

An early bird discount price of £224 is available until 3rd February 2010 midnight.
The cost includes all materials, refreshments and lunch. After this date the full regular price of £280 applies.

Enter Promotional code KHLVA for Web Virtual Attendance
Enter Promotional code KHLFCD for leather bound presentation pack, dispatched 1 week after the event.

You can watch previous courses run by KHLInteractive for free from their dedicated streaming page.

The half-day seminar covered best practice in the areas:

• Understanding SCORM functionality & compliance
• SCORM data parsing advice and how LMS calls work
• Setting-up a content server
• Setting-up a test environment
• Content re-purposing / re-mediation approaches
• SCORM standards testing strategies
• Suggestions for future support & access to on-line resources
• Personal experiences with OLM & e-Learning in general.

The videos above show presentations from the day focusing on SCORM best practice, Project managing e-Learning projects and effective approaches for re-purposing content.
(Please select each seminar video from the On Demand Playlist entitled: ‘e-Learning Best Practice Seminar, London, 15th December 2009′.

Background

Oracle Learning Management (OLM) is a unified learning delivery system that allows organisations to extend training to employees, customers, and partners. OLM offers a wide range of functionality, from on-line classroom management to self-service learner joining options / enrolment. The following link takes you to a video that shows you OLM in action. However, this seminar focused on developing e-Learning content NOT administration features of OLM.

OLM supports SCORM 1.2 and hopefully future releases will support greater SCORM functionality. OLM is tightly integrated with the Oracle Human Resources applications, leveraging existing organisation structures, management hierarchies and employee data.

Working closely with Oracle we  identified the need to offer a forum of sharing in practical skills, challenges and approaches for implementing effective e-Learning solutions, for example: re-mediation, re-purposing and selecting meta-data models are just as important as developing content itself. In addition, learning paths and selecting the most appropriate tracking data from learners should all be part of the initial learning design.

The seminar was presented by Dr Savi S Arora and Jon Turner and leading experts in the field of implementing practical e-Learning solutions.

Dr Savi Arora has been prolific documenter regarding standards for implementing Learning Management Systems, getting content to work, for example and passing tracking data. Dr Savi is the UK Managing Director of Knowledge Hemispheres – an leading e-Learning and New Media production and e-Learning integration company. Also presenting at the conference was Jon Turner, a thought leader and practitioner in the area of e-Learning standards, implementation methodologies and strategy.

Mr Jon Turner is Managing Director of one of Europe’s leading e-Learning companies: Quistor.

For all the latest courses, including courses on New and Social media best practice,including on-line registration for either in-person or virtual attendance please click here.

The immediate answer is yes, absolutely. However, as we have always stated, one has to think about the meaning behind the message,
The videos at the end of this article show you the potential that augmented reality could deliver.
We’re still checking out how it all works but it looks promising for:

• Timestamped advertising
• Behind the scenes at events
• New reality TV insights – incase you can’t get enough of the regular fix!
• Product placement
• Restaurant reviews
• New Avatars based on what you wear – In the example, you could change your outfit if you ’stuck on’ the enabling interface/ stitched in device.
• Greater interactive gaming
• Interactive business cards.
• Internal views of products, for example a car – All you do is rotate your magazine!
• Making magazines even more interactive.
• An extended City Tour guide – linked in with your mobile phone’s GPS.
• Interactive museum – With characters from history springing to life!
• Story telling coming to life (i-magic book) – The images just jump off the page!
• A new future for presenting prototype’s and eventually future versions to the final product to a client or construction project.
• Multi-views (3D), inc: medical overlays – for surgeons, before your operation!
• Fantastic journalist opportunities, both for creative views and incorporating Podcasts, both audio and video
• More interactive Podcasts, e.g: Corporate podcasts linked through internal newsletters.
• New forms of e-Learning classrooms but through a virtual gateway.

Just imagine if a tablet PC could include an element of augmented reality.
It is almost another spin on the Semantic Web that Tim Berners-Lee once spoke about. In this case the real-world merges with the virtual world to present new dimensions!

One of the most exciting applications could be something like a series of resturant reviews or even special offer menus. All one would have to do is just aiming your mobile device from your street bound location.

What we need next is a virtual shopping cart and a virtual bank with some virtual currency!!

The good thing about the U1 product is its potential to both adapt and provide flexible applications.

Another interesting concept is the 2 screen e-Book. I always wondered how writing an e-Book with links would work. Cynics suggest that it could limit the writing capability as the tapestry or mental images provided by great text will be compromised by a simple link. My view is that there is room for those that want an ascetic feel of a book and / or creative writing.

Take a look at the following. I wonder how many actual e-Books with interactivity are actually available yet?

Some interesting stats here:

• Awareness of podcasting grew from 37% of Americans to 43%
• Podcast listeners are extensive social network users.
• One in four Americans indicated that they have ever downloaded and watched/listened to an audio or video podcast
• The number one reason given for podcast consumption was time-shifting–the ability to consume content whenever the consumer desires.
• Podcast consumers continue to be attractive advertising targets; yet are increasingly unreachable through traditional, interrupt advertising
• Podcast listeners are a highly educated and affluent
• Podcast consumers spend more than 7hrs per week on line.
• 18-44 male listeners tends to be the major consumer demographic
• Power watching is an interesting term

The suggest that 27M Americans have listened to a podcast because they want to listen or watch content when ever they want to. They (Americans) lke the time shifting convenience.

With recent sales calls that we at Knowledge Hemispheres have made in the UK, we notice that there is still limited awareness of what a podcast is! However, this may change as the purchase of MP3 players continues to rise. It is also worth considering how much is downloaded Vs how much is watched/listened to ondemand.

It would also be interesting to see what type of podcasts are popular.

Let us see what the shifts will be in 2010?

This suggests that there is hope for us who have been excited about the potential of podcasting as a great communication vehicle for corporations. Cynics may suggest that this gives the choice to ignore yet another posting. More optimistic people will take the attitude that it is another form of outreach for corporation executives.

At Knowledge Hemispheres we have always advocated the power to communicate to clients, for example, by featuring common best practice service elements or innovation in the use of products/services (both internally and externally, inc: Partner organisations).

It would be interesting to see if the take-up of podcasting is greater amongst technical organisations. If so, it could be that technical set-up could be faster. However, in all cases it is not about the technology that provides capability but more about the meaning behind the message and the care taken in its construct to make a difference.