Agency3: Boston Web Design & Development

Blogs have been around for many years. They started out, in the beginning, as great personal journals for Internet users who wanted to share their daily lives with their family and friends. Now, fast forward through the years to today; where they are now commonly used as business tools as well as private diaries of sorts.

Blogs are basically mini-websites authors use to post information about a specific topic. Some blogs share experiences of an author’s career path, while others provide up to date news concerning the topic their blog presents.

What Makes Blogs Such a Great Tool to a Business Owner?

Blogs can provide so many opportunities for business to reap rewards that no business website should be without one. Here are some of the benefits a blog can provide any business owner:

A blog can drive more targeted traffic to their main site.

Blogs are favorites of search engines. They provide up to date content on a regular basis, so search engines will find them easier. Blogs can also be linked with other like-minded blogs to allow for more click-through visitors. Social bookmarking sites, social media sites and even message board forums love them as well. People will refer their friends to them when they see something they like.

Blogs make it easier to gain return visitors.

If a visitor likes your blog, they’ll keep coming back to see what else you have to say on a specific topic. Business blogs can be linked to the main company site as well. The more times people stop by, the more chances an owner has of getting those visitors to your business site.

Blogs allow one to easily gain expert status amongst a target audience.

The more you blog about your site’s topic, the more you come across as an expert in that field. A visitor can be awed by the information you’re offering them and could look up to you as an expert on a particular subject. Now, the next time they need to buy a certain product or need help with something in that area, they will think of you first.

Blogs are user friendly and inexpensive to boot.

There are blog programs that you can sign up for free or for a very nominal fee. Most blogs are easy to set up as they generally walk you through the process step-by-step. There aren’t too many marketing tools that are as easy to use and inexpensive to obtain. This alone makes a blog painless to your business budget.

Business blogs are easier when it comes to upkeep.

Blogs are fun to use, which makes them much easier to maintain. Posting regular tidbits of your chosen topic keeps a blog updated without a lot of hassle. Updating websites is essential, but can be time consuming and confusing as well.

The biggest benefit business blogs provide is…

Building Rapport with Your Target Audience

This is, by far, the best benefit you can obtain from a blog. Blogs have comment sections where readers can leave messages for you to let you know they liked what you said in a post or to add their own thoughts on the topic at hand.

You’re building a relationship with your target audience that can help gain trust from them as well as find out what they’re looking for in a product. This is your way to get an inside look at what your customer’s wants and needs are without spending lots of money on marketing surveys and advertisements that don’t work.

Blogs can give your business everything mentioned above and more. Adding a blog to your arsenal of marketing tools is a must do for any online business owner.

LinkedIn just added a new “applications” feature that allows users to add certain applications to their profiles. According to the LinkedIn blog:

The eight applications that you see live today on LinkedIn include productivity enhancing applications from Amazon, Box.net, Google, Huddle, Six Apart, SlideShare, Tripit, and WordPress as well a Company Buzz application developed by LinkedIn. Each of these applications will help you stay current and competitive as a professional in today’s rapidly changing business world.

This announcement is very timely. We gave a presentation to the Mass. Society of CPA’s today and talked about the applications functionality available on Facebook. This new functionality opens your Facebook profile up a little and allows you to share more information with the professional network you have on LinkedIn.

For example, if your firm has a blog you can now have the posts from your blog automatically flow through to your LinkedIn profile. Once you setup the initial connection everything else is automatic.

Here is the video that accompanied the official announcement:

Today, we gave a presentation to the Massachusetts Society of Certified Public Accountants on the use of social media in their marketing, client relations and recruiting efforts. It was a great group and we wanted to say thanks to everyone who attended and participated in the discussion. In addition, we want to thank our new friends at The Braver Group for hosting the event at their offices in Newton, MA.

Social Media

In this +/- hour long presentation we provided an overview of several key social media tools and platforms that every professional service firm can use to increase visibility, attract new talent, interact with current customers and reach out to new customers. In addition, we discussed how to incorporate a blog into your marketing mix, the use of social bookmarking services, social networking websites and knowledge sharing websites.

• Blogging - why your firm should be blogging, how to create a blogging strategy, free software you can use to power your blog, the basics of blog content and how you can increase your visibility and ensure your blog is found.
• RSS - What is RSS?  how to use a  feed reader to help with your marketing and social media efforts.
• Social News & Bookmarking - Using social bookmarking & social news sites to promote the content created by your professional services firm.
• Social Networking - Using Facebook and LinkedIn to promote your business, reach prospective hires, connect with current and potential clients.
• Knowledge Sharing - Using Yahoo! Answers and LinkedIn Answers to share your knowledge and increase your visibility online.

Need A Speaker?

Need a speaker for your association or organization? We really enjoy doing these types of presentations and we are available to present this and several other topics to your group. Contact us at 866-932-2923 to talk more.

Once you have created your website and setup an email newsletter, you need to motivate people to subscribe to your newsletter. Here are 5 things you can do to grow your subscriber list.

• Ask visitors to subscribe to your newsletter. Place a subscription form on your website and ask users to subscribe. This is easy.
• Have them sign-up to get access to download a free report or guide. If you are a landscaper you could provide a planting schedule to let people know when to plant different types of plants. If you are a dog walker you could provide a simple dog training guide or a list of local dog parks.
• Hold a free contest or sweepstakes at your web site. Ask them to give you their contact information to enter the drawing.
• Hold an interactive poll on your web site. Ask your visitors to email you their vote or opinion.
• Give people who visit your web site a free course sent via email. Just ask them to fill out their contact information to receive the free course.

By the way, did you know that Agency3 publishes a great email newsletter. You can subscribe in the sidebar on this page.

Sustainable Internet aims to facilitate the sharing of information on carbon neutral & eco friendly web hosting and related topics with the goal of creating a more green, sustainable internet. They noticed that we offset our energy usage with Carbon Credits and we want to thank them for mentioning us.

Visit: Carbon Neutral Hosting — Sustainable Internet.

Agency3 operates our servers in intelligent clusters, which makes us fairly efficient with our infrastructure and power usage. Still, internet operations need electricity, and a majority of that power is generated from coal-burning power plants. Agency3, in partnership with Native Energy, is countering our environmental impact by offsetting the power we use from fossil fuels with renewable energy credits. Our goals are to make our hosting operation completely carbon neutral and to invest in projects that bring more clean energy into the power grid.

Reducing Our Carbon Footprint

With Native Energy, you can help finance and build new clean and renewable energy projects that help create sustainable economic benefits for Native Americans, Alaska Native villages and other local communities, and that help America’s family farmers compete with agribusiness. These projects will displace electricity from fossil fuels and reduce other greenhouse gas emissions on your behalf, making up for the CO2 emissions you can’t avoid.

We know this is not a perfect solution, but it does help us offset much of the energy we use every day and we are pretty proud of it.

Do you know what RSS feeds are? According to Wikipedia RSS feeds are:

RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a “feed” or “web feed” or “channel”) contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with web sites in an automated manner that can be piped into special programs or filtered displays.

Is that any clearer? No? We did not think so either. Try watching the video below for a very clean explanation of what RSS feeds do and how you can use them.

Now that you have a basic understanding of what RSS feeds are and how they are used, you can subscribe to our feed.

Martha Stewart recently announced that her blog is moving from Typepad to Wordpress. We develop a lot of sites with Wordpress and it is great to see such a high visibility site being powered by the platform we love and recommend every day.

Visit: The Martha Blog : Blog upgrade news!

One a related note, Rhea from the The Gemini Web was one of the first people to comment on Martha’s post about the transition. Rhea is a client and a phenomenal blogger and it is great to bump into her in the Blogosphere.

Welcome to the first installment of our weekly web Q & A. We plan to post a new question to the “Anwers” section of LinkedIn every week and reveal our favorite answers here on our blog. The first question in our series:

What is the most effective thing you have done to market your business on the web?

Answer Here

We will post our favorite answer here next week with the newest question in the series.

Did you know that Google has a ton of free tools available to help your non-profit organization? The site also features ideas and tutorials that will help you use Google tools to promote your work, raise money and operate more effeciently.

Our personal favorites:

• Accept online donations without any transaction fees until 2009 using Google Checkout.
• Apply for free advertising through the Google grants program. This can help raise awareness of your organization and generate traffic for your website.

Learn more: Google for Non-Profits.