Why you need to be blogging now

By Tim Priebe on August 25, 2009 at 1:05 pm in Video, blogging

Thanks to Christina Hills for posting the following on her blog. I thought I would share it with my audience as well.

Here is a very short video clip from Seth Godin and Tom Peters (both best selling authors) on why you need to be blogging now.  And you’ll be very surprised to hear what they say.  It’s not the typical ‘Internet Marketing’ talk. Instead it sums up one of the reason’s why I feel it’s important for you to blog (and to be posting to Twitter)

Embed a YouTube Video in a Wordpress Blog, part 1

By Tim Priebe on February 23, 2009 at 11:38 am in Development, blogging

There’s a couple of ways to embed videos in a Wordpress blog. The first is a simple copying and pasting of code. The second actually allows you to post them directly from YouTube’s website, but it’s slightly more complicated to setup initially.

Copying code from YouTube’s site

First, watch the video you want to put on your blog. For our example, we’ve picked the video we did on linking to your Facebook profile.

youtube-embed-1

In the screenshot above, you can see an area highlighted to the top right of the video. Simply copy the code in the Embed field.

Next, visit your blog and create a new post or page.

youtube-embed-2

In the screenshot above, you can see a couple of highlighted areas. To the top right of the post’s content area, click on the HTML tab. Then, paste the code into the content area. Click the publish button, and you’re good to go.

Next time I blog, we’ll take a look at the slightly more complicated (but better in the long run) way to post videos to your blog directly from YouTube.

Should I blog?

By Tim Priebe on January 1, 2009 at 10:17 pm in blogging

Blog Microphone

Happy new year, everyone! Making any new year’s resolutions? Wondering if your business could benefit from a resolution for you to start blogging? Here’s a few questions to ask yourself.

Can I write once a week?

If you can’t blog at least once a week, don’t bother. One thing worse than no blog at all is a blog that hasn’t been updated in months. After all, if the last blog entry someone sees is six months old, how do they even know your business is still around?

Keep in mind that you can write several blog entries at once, then schedule them to be published once a week, or more often even.

Do I have something interesting to say?

You can write every day for a whole year, but if you aren’t interesting to your current and potential customers, there’s not much point. The ultimate point is to keep current customers and/or get new ones. So if they aren’t interested, don’t bother.

Can I stick with it with no encouragement whatsoever?

So you’re writing once a week and have some interesting things to say. But you’re getting no feedback. No one is posting comments, no one is emailing you to tell you they loved your latest blog post.

Cry me a river.

The general rule of thumb is that 1% of visitors to a website will be an active participant in some way. So you may have 99 readers, but no one is commenting. You may have 99 readers, but no one is telling you that they loved your great blog post. Just because you’re not getting many comments does not mean you should stop posting.

And when you do get that first comment or first email, celebrate! That means there are probably 99 other people thouroughly enjoying your blog posts that just haven’t bothered to tell you so.

So if you can write something interesting at least once a week and stick with it, you should be blogging for your business! It will allow your website visitors to feel like they know you, making them that much more likely to do business with you.