Ok, so you have decided that starting a blog would be an avenue for you to increase exposure to your business online and that you have the commitment it would take to start and maintain a blog . . . .
So, “how do I get started”, you ask.
Excellent question, and there are some important considerations to take into account before you do.
Seems hardly a day goes by when some application or other doesn’t need to be upgraded these days.
We had been working on issues getting the WordPress plug-in, Subscribe2, to work on our blog for several weeks to no avail . . . and were waiting for their imminent release of version 4.5 hoping that would solve our problems. It didn’t; infact, we pretty much crashed our backend by upgrading to it.
Web Merchant Services has spent the better part of the first quarter of 2008 working along side iChapter Network to improve the iChapter Network application.
iChapter is a novel reservation management system specifically developed for non-profit organizations such as APICS — the “Advanced Processing and Inventroy Control Society” now known as “The Association for Operations Management” ( yeah, the acronym doesn’t work anymore ). For more about iChapter, see:
http://www.wmsmerchantservices.com/iChapter/default.asp
Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing have come a long way since the days of meta tags and banner ads. One of the newer and rapidly growing strategies for marketing your business online is blogging.
There is a lot of buzz about blogs these days – they are rapidly reshaping social and news networking, but awareness of how blogging can increase exposure for your business online – and thereby increase profits – is really emerging relatively recently. Most online businesses have not yet started to blog. I mean, heck . . . . we only just started poking our nose into the “blogosphere” in early 2008.
As we were looking at blogging as a new Internet Marketing vehicle/medium for our clients to take advantage of, we followed the rest of the SEO herd to WordPress. All of the SEO’s that are promoting blogging to their clients seem to prefer WordPress ( with what seems to be good reason, but that is a topic for another post ), and what’s more, pretty much every blog we looked at worth looking at had the tell-tale signs of a hosted WordPress application ( WordPress.org as opposed to the WordPress.com option ).
So, to make that long story short, we settled on WordPress as the blogging application we would recommend to our own clients.
However, WordPress is a PHP/MySQL application, and we know what that means . . . . it would be “happiest” in a “LAMP” ( Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP ) environment while we run Windows, IIS servers supporting MySQL & PHP . . . but even though WordPress is a pretty darned sophisticated application, we wanted to prove that we can run it just as well on a Windows servers.
And, of course, we hit some bumps.
It’s not news at all that LAMP ( Linux, Apach, MySQL, PHP ) servers handle many things via mod_rewrite and .htaccess.
Frankly, we’ve been jealous of what can be done so simply on a LAMP server via a .htaccess file that is just NOT so simple at all to do on a Windows server via IIS.
However, we’re never daunted . . . there is always a way!
Querying this subject via search engines will likely leave on with the impression that it just can’t be done as easily on a Windows/ISS server as it can be done on a LAMP server . . . . but the brilliant minds at HeliconTech.com have cracked the nut! And WMS is righgt behind them.
Owners of new Blogspot or WordPress sites may worry that Google won’t index them. And we can’t guarantee that Google will do so quickly, or even that the search giant will do so at all. There’s a fair amount of evidence suggesting that things will be taken care of sooner rather than later, however.
$4,000 USD will be awarded to the first prize winner, the member with the most unique replies.
$700 USD will be awarded to the second runner up.
$300 USD will be awarded to the third runner up.
$50 will then be awarded to the 4th-13th place winners.
What you need to do is create the forum threads that will get the most replies in 2 weeks.
I have to admit that I’ve always regarded online forums as nothing much more than locations to mine information from altruistic folks who have taken the time to post solutions to problems I need to solve at best or a total waste of my time at worst.
However, a new forum has just come along — started by Michael Kane — that I have just fallen for “hook, line, and sinker” . . . . www.WebsiteGuru.com
This forum got started so quickly and with such a great community of folks, that I’ve invested a good deal of time becoming a valuable memeber of it ( look for Sean@WMS ).
To quote my friend Cricket:
It is a brand-new forum, filled with the best of the best. This place is gonna rock because there are so many members and website gurus there who truly have a clue about how to run an Internet business and make money online.
http://www.website-development-training.com/guru/
I highly encourage you to register with WebsiteGuru.com, introduce yourself, and start asking questions. There are both a large number of some of the Web’s most brilliant folks and a very large and growing number of other business owners.
And to take a page from Dan Kennedy’s book — one of the best ways to find innovative avenues for success in your business is to see what is working in other business models and translate that to your own business.
I have considered many times over the past few years whether to start a forum for online business owners and web merchants to share their ideas and just kept putting it off . . . . But now there’s a forum that is much better than I could have imagined creating.
Looking forward to seeing your there.