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…

Topics touched on during our presentation:

• The "garden" approach to website management 
• Usability – how easy is your website to use and does it lead your readers to where you want them to go and what you'd like them to do? 
• Professionalism – quality of text content and design 
• Technical considerations – good solutions for extensibility and within budgetary constraints

We welcome you to attend this presentation. It will be oriented towards non-web professionals, i.e., the business owner evaluating requirements for his or her own website who doesn't necessarily have much experience with website design.

Registration…

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)

Your domain name should mirror the image you want your company to project. The URL you choose can have an impact on brand identity and help with keyword ranking. Choose carefully.

One Lakenetwork client, Healing High Rise Inc., chose www.healinghighriseinc.com. But people couldn’t seem to remember the “inc” at the end, so they’d end up at the wrong site. We changed the URL to www.learnefttoday.com, EFT standing for Emotional Freedom Technique, an energy healing method taught by the company. The company still uses its business name in the header on the site. A bonus to using learnefttoday is that EFT is in the domain name, therefore helpful in getting search engines to pick it up.

Something else to consider when deciding on your domain name is to choose one that describes your company or its product or service. Lakenetwork designed a site for a pest control company called Green Pest Control. The owner came up with www.stopthecrawling.com, memorable with a humorous twist.

CamelotHomeInspections.com wasn’t available when Erick Miller, president of Camelot Home Inspections, Inc., was registering his domain name. Miller chose www.weinspectforyou.com for the Willoughby, Ohio company, leaving no doubt as to what service they offer.

“I tried to make it coincide with what the company does, something that was catchy and easy to remember,” said Miller.

Here are some does and don’ts:

Don’t use free e-mail accounts for business such as Yahoo!, AOL or Gmail. Instead use your business domain name for all business communications. For example, use JoeSSS@AcmeWidgets.com instead of AcmeWidgets@yahoo.com or JoeSSS@yahoo.com.

Do purchase multiple versions of your domain name, including .com, .org, .net, .biz, hyphenations between words, and common misspellings. You could also purchase alternate domain names such as product names, brand names and any other keywords that might be typed in randomly.

Remember, a name that makes perfect sense to you may be too hard for other people to remember. Is your domain easy to say? Is it hard to spell? Do you have to explain why you chose it? Keep it short and memorable, use keywords in your business name, and don’t use underscores. Register your domain name for five to 10 years at a time rather than renewing every year, because some search engines give more credence to a company that has confidence it’s going to stick around.

More ideas can be found at http://www.searchengineguide.com/stoney-degeyter/the-best-damn-web-marketing-checklist-fo.php.

But there’s one element that never changes: Writing words that sell.

“Words That Sell: A Thesaurus to Help Promote Your Products, Services, and Ideas” is a classic marketing book available on Amazon.com, published in 1984 and reprinted in 2006. Words That Sell has come to our rescue many times in creating vibrant copy that persuades and informs powerfully.

If you get stuck for just the right word, most regular dictionaries and thesauri can leave you cold. You need words that grab ya.

Does your company “pride itself on its reliability?” How dull. Add some zing with words like:

• High-performance
• Durable
• Built to last; ruggedly built.

Why not say that you have high standards, stringent standards, rigorous standards, or that it’s laboratory tested or precision engineered? Heck, why not say it will “last a lifetime” or “last for generations”?

Is your product powerful? Or is it dynamite, high-voltage, Herculean, titanic, Promethean, muscular or masterful?

Author Richard Bayan wrote that he rummaged through huge stacks of magazines, newspaper, brochures and catalogs, listened for compelling phrases on television and radio, and combed dictionaries to create “your personal magic kit.”

Words That Sell is a super tool for creating great copy. Hmmm . . . maybe we should reword that:

“At last! Now there’s an even better way to write mesmerizing copy! Words That Sell stirs the imagination and adds professional writing skills to your toolbox. You’ll wonder how you ever got along without it!”

• The site is simple to navigate
• Pages load quickly
• Photos are clear and of obvious quality
• Contact information is easy to find on EVERY page
• Text is bullet-pointed so the visitor is not overloaded with too much information.
• The site lists professional organizations the B&B belongs to, thereby lending credibility.
• Listing the prices for each room has a dual benefit of saving both the site visitor and the business owner time by necessitating fewer phone calls.

See for yourself…http://www.fitzgeraldsbnb.com

The Fitzgeralds owe much of their business to their site. They spend most of their marketing dollars online.

“The past year we hired someone to update our Web site and that has really paid off,” Debra said. “People come back to see us again and again.