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…

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…

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! 

In my last post, I described how WordPress is a great tool that empowers small businesses and organizations to efficiently create a lot of content (information) that can be syndicated and shared. This is important. The volume of content on a website is one of the key factors in being able to find the site on the Internet because volume is an indicator of credibility to search engines. And the easier it is to share a site's content, the more likely it is that the content will be shared and help drive incoming traffic.

For a professional presence, WordPress works best in a collaborative relationship between business owner and professional web design firm with the design firm laying out the initial website infrastructure and assisting as needed throughout the lifespan of the site. WordPress gives the layman businessperson the ability to edit page content and add simple new pages, and it's an economical way to implement a robust website with a web design firm.

If you are a budget-oriented business person who has some technical skill, you be might be considering a DIY site. Assess your skills. Here are some factors to consider if you’d like to develop your own site without the aid of a professional web firm.

• Do you have graphic design skills, or can you use Photoshop or a similar program to edit your logo and process your photos to look good on your site?
• Do you know and understand the advantages of using one predeveloped WordPress theme over another?
• Do you know at least a little bit of html?
• Can you figure out how to navigate most websites and do what you need to do on them (like Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.)? Do you know how to upload photos or is it a frustrating process for you?
• Are you willing to spend a lot of time to learn about basic search engine optimization practices in WordPress? And are you at ease using Google to perform searches?
• Do you understand how to back up your website completely and can you figure out how to minimize comment spam and hackers in WordPress?
• Can you write well? Is your writing rife with spelling and grammatical errors?

If you are weak in any one of these areas, it is probably best to consult with a professional firm to fill in the gaps.

Part I: "The Perfect Website"
Part II: "A Great Budget Situation–WordPress"

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

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 part one of a series of followup posts from our panel discussion at Lake Communicators, "When to DIY and When to Call the Pros." 

Can the layman create a perfect, small site with no experience?

The short answer is no. It's even difficult for a professional web firm to create a perfect site. Even if the perfect site exists today, it is sure to become obsolete over time based on changing design and useability trends.

Can the layman create a not-so-perfect, yet adequate and professional site?

This is possible; the basic constraints are time, ability, and money. 

Consider time and money. If you are pulling in a decent amount of income for your business, and you're busy, can you really afford to take time off to learn new skills and create a website yourself? Unless you have this time, you'll probably save money by outsourcing the work to a professional.

Assess your skills. Are you a good writer? Do you know how to upload files and navigate complex sites? Do you have basic graphic design skills, such as being able to create an appealing, professional-looking flyer in Word? Do you know any html? 

If you've answered no to any of these questions, then don't despair. You can still create an adequate site, but you'll probably need the assistance of a web design firm, writer or graphic designer. You can still save money by doing some of the work yourself. 

Stay tuned for the next followup post in this series: "A great budget situation"

Consider the following:

What is the ideal situation for managing a web presence?

• You are a very large corporation with a huge budget for websites and you can afford to pay a team to implement your social media, have a huge website with multiple articles posted daily, and your website looks really interesting and professional and is easy to navigate.
• If reduced to a single person: the best person implementing a complete website would be an artist who can write well and does website development for a living…

A business owner who is cramped for cash might consider some DIY web strategies…

What it comes down to:

• CASH and TIME
• Expertise on-hand

Followup posts:

• The Perfect Website
• A Great Budget Situation

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)

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A Joomla site gives you the power to create robust, extensible, shareable web content without having to know how to program in html. It contains a huge amount of pre-built functionality such as event calendars, site search, ad management and many third party extensions such as shopping carts and galleries.

Why use Lakenetwork?

We can help define your starting point with Joomla. We create custom Joomla templates that are branded with your specific look and feel, completely original and to your specification. With a number of Joomla sites under our belt, we have the expertise to get you up and running fast. We also offer Joomla instruction and support.

Joomla Starting Point

So, you’ve got a new Joomla site–now what do you do with it? How do you create content? Joomla fortunately has a thriving user community and robust documentation. You can visit the Joomla Administrator Guide here. And this book seems to cover the basics of Joomla content generation and administration:

What else can I do with Joomla?

Visit the Joomla Extensions site to find just about any functionality you might want on your website, from social networking modules to e-commerce to user forums and much, much more.