In his book Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation and Earn Trust, Chris Brogan spends much oxgyen expounding upon the concept of "thought leadership" and how it applies to building up one's business. The term was coined by Joel Kurtzman, editor-in-chief of the magazine Strategy & Business.

A thought leader is someone who has helpful information and makes it available to the public. This applies to small businesses and organizations in several ways:

• Sharing useful information helps your customers and/or readers and potential customers better use your products and services.
• Sharing useful information helps your business or organization by fostering trust.
• Sharing useful information helps your business or organization by fostering its credibility.

Blogging is a great and inexpensive means of providing one's thoughts to the public, but has other dividends as well:

• It increases traffic to websites via direct and indirect means such as a greater likelihood of being found in search engines, providing information that prompts people to share blog entries, and subscription to blog entries via tools such as feedburner.
• It provides a means of organizing the blogger's thoughts which can result in more focused, higher quality business practices.

Where to start

I recommend WordPress as a blogging platform. It's free and very versatile, and can be easily installed in a subdirectory on your existing website. It can be used to manage your entire website if you wish. It is completely customizable, so your web developer can create your own theme that has your own specific design without any technical constraints from WordPress's end other than the time to code the theme.

Many plugins are available for WordPress, including ones that can help you "get the word out" by facilitating social media sharing.

If possible, install WordPress on the same domain as your website because will help with your domain's informational footprint, or "domain authority." Also, it improves the amount of activity going on on your site. Both are good criteria that search engines such as Google can use to help determine a site's relevancy. (We are in the process of doing this ourselves.)

To be continued…

In the past, your web designer might have been the only one working on your website. But with today's technologies and expectations, you as business owner, content contributor, or marketer can have an expanded, active role in posting information on your website. 

The garden is an appropriate metaphor for websites. Websites can be seen as living and breathing things based on the interactivity they can foster. They are virtual gardens that you stake out and refer to by domain. And you, the owner of your site, can be the gardener.

Website gardens benefit from attracting beneficial organisms, i.e. customers, and giving them a spade to dig with, tools to see what's going on, tools for interacting with you and your site and your business. Customers and readers expect to be able to comment on blog entries, to follow up on issues, to really have the ability to gain useful information and engage with you online and not just via email.

Ergo, interactivity and being able to post information yourself is an important component in making your website an engine that can help you promote your products and services.

Benefits of website gardening:

1. The more information you post (as long as it is well organized), the larger the footprint of your garden on the web, which improves your chances for more website traffic driven by search engine indexing.

2. The more items you've planted (i.e. blog posts) the higher your credibility in social media avenues such as LinkedIn and Facebook (as long as posts are relevant and professional).

3. Regularly generating information for your website has indirect benefits in other ways; that of self-discipline, of policy development, etc.

Gardening tools and techniques:

- Blogging and other Social Media use
- Use of tools for engagement such as QR codes
- eNewsletters (like Constant Contact) and the ability to sign up on your site
- RSS subscriptions, Google Feedburner
- Commenting capability

To be continued…

Google+ is currently testing with a small number of people, but it is possible to get an invitation from Google+ once it's ready.

If Google is making the investment in developing this, I tend to trust that it will be a fairly sound and useful social media platform. It looks fun, too!

Business and organization marketers might be interested in the potential application of this technology for SEO and SMO but like any social media platform, the context of sharing should make sense. Social media is a personal experience for many. The marketing messages placed on a particular social media platform should depend on the way the audience opts in to the message stream to ensure a good audience experience.

For those who want to know more, Social Media guru Chris Brogan has been offering a lot of interesting insights about the new platform.

Blogging

The traditional model used to involve you in that you could specify a creative direction for your website developer, offer some initial content, and the developer would code it.

But today you can become even more a part of the team. Not only can you specify the creative direction of your website; you can become more involved in creating and improving your website. 

The footprint of your website, i.e., the amount of information on the website, lends credibility to the site. If your site has a lot of information, it follows that you've invested a lot in it and that it is a good resource for people.

Blogging is an inexpensive and easy way to increase the amount of information on your website. We recommend that most of our customers blog if they can spare the time and if they can write compelling, professional content. WordPress is a great, free tool traditionally associated with blogging. But it can manage not only your blog, but your entire site, and your website designer can code it to look any way you'd like to best suit your needs. As a matter of fact, we've started to code most of our sites with WordPress. 

Incoming Links, You and Your Community

Incoming links have always been a key area that boosts search engine placement. It follows that the more links there are to your website, the more credible your website. We recommend that our customers try to develop their incoming links as much as possible. Ideally this could happen in conjunction with a social media effort and by creating content and periodic articles that people find compelling; articles that they'd like to share.

In addition, you can develop your incoming links by becoming involved in other organizations. Volunteer to write blog entries on their blogs! It is usually appropriate to have a link to your website in your article on their blog, or even an additional couple of links to blog entries you've created for your own website. This is a great way to develop not only incoming links, but to become more engaged in a positive way with a community with which you'd like to network.

Ratings: Encourage Your Customers to Play

Your customers can become more of a part of your team, too. Google seems to need to know that other people care about your business or organization; this makes sense. I believe that business rating tools are becoming more important. I notice that placement in Google Places results seems to correspond with businesses that have been rated well by services such as Citysearch  and the rating mechanism for each place page that Google provides. The more ratings, the better the placement, although this could just be dependent on the general popularity of the site. I have not really started pushing this strategy yet and don't know the result in terms of incoming traffic, but it seems to make sense.

A good approach to this would be to ask customers if they would place a review on your business or organization's Google Place page. That said, we'd appreciate a shout out on our Google Place page if you find these articles stimulating and/or if you are a client!

Be a Good Team Mate

Many variables are critical to the success of your web presence. We recommend being very thoughtful in the coding, presentation, and text content on your site. Ultimately, the key thing is to think like your potential audience and to try to anticipate its needs. 

Consider conversion optimization when creating the core content for your site. Blog entries can be a bit more spontaneous, but the core service pages and home page of your site need to orient your potential client and give them a reason to want to participate, and make to it easy for them as well! 

Practically speaking, there are a lot of great low budget website promotion tools available to the layman. One of the best tools around is WordPress. It's not just a blogging platform. WordPress can be programmed to run your entire website.

WordPress is well suited to the needs of small businesses on the web:

• It's free
• Well-supported and popular (so it will be around for a while)
• Can be maintained by the layman
• Many great options (plugins and widgets)
• Great for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
• Great for Web 2.0

We've had success with a number of websites implemented in WordPress. We design the initial site, the home page "look and feel" and features that are supported and integrated into the site, and our customers can take it from there by fleshing out each page's text content, adding new pages and creating blog posts. This saves our customers some money because they do not have to rely on us to create new pages, and can do many website maintenance tasks themselves as well.

It is possible, of course, to use a canned "theme" for your WordPress site. But to integrate your company's graphics into a canned theme requires some know-how of graphic design and web programming if the site is to look professional.

I'd like to talk a little bit search engine optimization (SEO). Consider the websites of just five years ago. Five years ago, it was a lot easier to attain high rankings in search engines. Why? Because there were fewer sites competing for the same key search phrases, and because today's web programmers have become more sophisticated, and because big corporations tend to crowd out smaller businesses for the most popular terms.

Some key factors for high search engine rankings include:

• The volume of content on site
• That it is a well structured site (optimized and coded for search engines)
• The number of sites linking to the site

WordPress empowers the small business person in all these categories. 

Content
Your website needs to stay relevant and have a lot of content. If you don't have applicable content for a particular search phrase on your website, it cannot come up in a search engine. The phrase must be on your site, and the more often the phrase is on your site, the more search engine authority your site has for that particular phrase. By enabling you to add pages and blog entries (which are seen as pages), you don't have to rely on the added expense of having a web programmer create every single page and post, and you can create many pages rich with key phrase terms for your business.

Coding
The web programmer can create a means for the business person to optimize each new page on the site. As long as the programmer is well-versed with current coding methodologies that are best for search engines, a framework will be in place so that the code of new pages is also suitable for search engines.

Incoming Links
Use of a good share plugin for WordPress facilitates the syndication of your content on the web. If the content of your page or post is compelling and your reader is prompted by some type of visual cue to share it, it is more likely to be tweeted or shared on Facebook or Linkedin or other social media outlets. Incoming links not only advertise your site's content, but in terms of search engines, links lend credibility to your content and are a consideration in the placement and listing algorithms used by search engines.

Part I: "The Perfect Website"

Stay tuned for the next followup post in this series. You can subscribe to this blog via email.

This is a very brief overview of the blog post process/screen:

1. Go to your blog’s website address.

2. Click the “Login” menu item under the “Meta” menu, right hand side of screen. This will bring you to a login screen.

3. Enter your user name and password. This will bring you to the WordPress dashboard.

4. Click on the “Posts” menu on the left hand side of the screen. A popdown menu will appear. Click on “Add New.”

5. The “Post” screen is roughly laid out as follows:

a. There’s a long text entry field at the very top where you can enter a subject. The subject should be an appealing description of the content within, and you should keep in mind that you should enter key phrases that people might look for when googling for content such as your blog.

b. The next area is a text area where you can enter your blog. (I suggest that you type out the blog in Windows Notepad and save it locally on your computer, then copy the text from Notepad into the blog.)

c. The next area is for an excerpt. Create a one or two sentence synopsis of your blog here, something that gives people more of an idea of the content of the blog.

d. Moving to the right hand side of the screen, the top area is the publish area. When you are ready to publish the blog, click the “Publish” button. You can also preview the blog in this area.

e. Post Tags. Enter 2-5 subjects to which this particular blog entry relates. Post tags should be phrases 1-2 words long.

f. Categories. The categories you enter here will appear on the home page of the blog. You should try to limit your categories to general or important topics for the blog, because all the categories you define will show up on the blog screen.

How to Enter Pictures

1. In the Add New or Edit Post screen, above the blog entry area, there’s a row of tool bar icons for formatting the blog. Above that, there are four icons to the right of the text “Upload/Insert.” The left-most icon looks like a square within a square; clicking on this icon allows you to select images from your computer.

2. Once you select an image and upload it, you can enter a caption (if necessary), edit the image alignment (recommended) among other things.

3. We recommend that when you create images for the blog, try to limit the width of the image to something less than 270 pixels wide. It would be good to settle on a standard width for the photos on the blog so that the entries have some consistency in presentation. Photoshop is a good tool you could use to prepare photos for websites and blogs.

Why should businesses blog?

Blogging improves your business’s credibility online, and adding more content online gives your business a larger digital footprint.

Lakenetwork.net can help your business get started blogging online. In addition to standard web development, we work with businesses and organizations to help improve their social media presence. Call us at (440) 975-9580 for more information or contact us online here.

Related articles

• How to make your blog posts something more, without getting in trouble (blogmistress.com)
• How To Add Flickr Images On Your Blog (johnchow.com)

OK, so you’ve got a new web site. How are you going to get people to come to the site?

Search engine optimization (SEO) used to be the main method of web site promotion. But Web 2.0 has arrived, and now you’ve got a number of tools to use from the driver’s seat of your web site.

Here are some ideas for consideration:

1. Have a blog? Claim your blog on Technorati and get feedback on the popularity of your blog.

“Getting Started with Technorati”

2. Generate compelling blog content that relates to your web site business. Find an educational mission and write about it.

3. Use Facebook. Create a business fan page and post engaging, relevant content on your page. We post information that corresponds to our educational mission (helping people promote their web sites) on our fan page.

Keep your audience in mind–don’t post spam; post information that can really be of use, and interact sincerely with people who are in your networking group.

Social media resources

4. Post your blog entries on social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

Related articles

• Six Reasons SEOs Love Blogs (searchengineguide.com)
• Three Blogging Tips (best-tutorial.net)
• Build Your Brand Through Social Media (lazerpromotions.com)

Consider this when sprucing up your Web site for the season:

Make sure the style and design fits your company’s personality. Visitors should be able to recognize your Web site immediately by use of the same branding you use offline.

Organization and ease of navigation are key. If customers can’t find what they are looking for where they expect to find it, they’ll look elsewhere.

Be sure your site works well on all Web browsers. You should test this every time you change design and content.

Other things to check while spring cleaning your site include security/privacy, ease of online checkout, and contact info. Be sure to include all methods of communication such as e-mail, phone and an FAQ section. Make it easy to find out who is your company spokesperson along with their contact info.

Periodically check your search engine position report to see which keywords are working and which aren’t. Finally, monitor social media to see how your company and site are being talked about in blogs and forums.