Well stop staring and start reading, because here’s five quick and simple tips that will revitalise your blog:

1. Be Brief: Your clients are going to read your posts while they’re on hold, in that two minute gap between calls, or on their tea break. That means they’re not going to be able to read a 20,000 word thesis on how your latest product will change the future of mankind.
2. Be Up to Date: Breaking News! Something is going on that will affect your clients! Make sure you tell them about it, and that you tell them fast!
3. Be Relevant: Make sure you’re always talking about things your clients want to hear about. Something you might find fascinating might bore the socks off your readers.
4. Keep to a Schedule: If people know when you’ll be updating your site, they’ll know when to visit. So work out a publishing schedule and try to stick to it!
5. Don’t Write Off the List Post: Easy to write, easy to read. Always make sure you’ve got a backup list post in your locker. Like this one for example.

For more bite-sized tips, follow FirstFound on Twitter.

But if you’re not using the right plugins, you’re not getting the most from your blog. So here’s The FirstFound Blog’s three favourite plugins:

Google Analytics for WordPress: Does exactly what it says on the tin. Adds Analytics tracking code to your site, so that you can monitor traffic to your blog, learn who’s visiting you, and find out which of your posts are most popular.

Sociable: Helps you harness Social Media to promote your posts. Sociable is fully customisable, so you can target as many or as few sites as you like. Although Twitter, Digg, Facebook and Mixx are a must!

HeadSpace2: If you want your blog to rank on the search engines, you’ll need to edit the site’s meta data. HeadSpace2 helps you do just that, quickly and easily.

If you’ve got any to add to our list, leave us a comment!

We all have days when we need to write a post or article, but just can’t think of what to do.

In times like these, I like to dip into my bag of cliches and fire up one of four tried and tested methods for putting a post together:

1: Get someone else to create your content!

This one actually needs you to do some networking. By networking, I of course mean “sitting on Twitter asking questions”. Everyone has hopes, aspirations and opinions. Give your followers a platform and publicity, and they’ll sit there writing content that you’re free to use. Just slap some witty or insightful book-ends on there, and voila! Blog post, ready to roll.

2: The Short Sharp Shock

Who says a blog article has to be long, involved and in-depth? Well, most people. Luckily, what people say and what people do are different things. You can get away with a short two paragraph article every now and then, so long as you’re witty and succinct. Sometimes a packet of crisps is more satisfying than a three-course meal.

3: All Aboard The Bandwagon!

Bandwagon jumping. With access to trend information at our fingertips, it’s never been so easy to see what people are talking about. It’s also never been so easy to see what other people are saying – so just pick something you disagree with and write about why that person is wrong. About half the article’s done for you already. Magic.

4: The List Post

This one’s the daddy of all cliches. List posts are easy to think up, easy to write and easy to read. Anyone can come up with a list, at any time, in any place. I thought up this very article whilst lying on the couch watching Loose Women.

Easy!

But you just can’t think of what to write about. You don’t want to write, you can’t bring yourself to write, but you have to write. So what do you do?

Luckily for you, The FirstFound Blog is here to help. Just take a look at our list of blog post ideas, and you’ll be inspired to write so many blog posts that you won’t be able to use them all.

• How Social Media helps in your niche
• A Case Study showing how you’ve helped your top client
• A User’s Guide for your top product
• The biggest upcoming developments in your industry
• How your company is weathering the recession
• A quirky article putting your sector’s spin on a sporting event
• Exciting developments or events in your company
• Helpful hints on avoiding scams in your industry
• Some seasonally-themed linkbait

And finally…

• A helpful list of blog ideas to help your readers

Hopefully this list will inspire you to feats of blogging greatness – but if there’s anything you think we can add, drop us a comment in the box below.

Because they’re accessible.  If your business wants to interact online, then a blog is a much friendlier face than a corporate website. It allows you to be spontaneous, charming and witty – and it creates linkable content that social media sites love. Once you’re up and running on Twitter, it’s time to enter the blogosphere. 

Can You Blog?

I’ve heard all the excuses. “I’m not a writer“, “I don’t know how to set up a website“, “I don’t have anything interesting to say.” All of the above excuses are bunk. Go to a search engine, type in any word related to your niche or business, followed by the word “blog”. Hit search.

You’ll see dozens of poorly designed, awfully written, dull as dishwater offerings from the worst bloggers on Earth. If they can blog, you can blog. The difference is, you’ll be doing it properly. Just remember these three things:

1. If you can’t write, read. There are dozens of decent websites that will show you how to write properly, if you take the time to read them. Doing a search for “copywriting blog” is always a good place to start.
2. If you can’t set up a website, use a template. Blogger and WordPress will help you set up a blog in seconds. I personally prefer WordPress, but play around. Set up both and try them out – they’re free – then stick with the one you like best.
3. If you don’t want to bore people, listen. Ask your friends, ask your clients, ask your Twitter network. They’ll be happy to tell you what they’d like to know about your business. All you need to do is listen.

Should You Blog?

Yes. Whether you’re a freelance web developer or a plumber, you should be blogging. There are two main reasons for this:

1. Search Engines love Blogs. If you’ve got your blog submitted to Google webmaster tools, it can be crawled and indexed within a matter of minutes. That means you can write an optimised entry, filled with links to your main business website, and have it start work on the same day. A good example of using a blog entry to create backlinks can be found here.
2. Users love Blogs. Words like linkbait and rantbait were coined to apply to blogs. Write something kooky, funny, or full of kittens, and your blog will be linked to by all and sundry – giving it a big boost in page rank which you can pass along to your main site. Write something snarky, funny and frothing – you’ll get the same effect. People want interesting content, and it’s easier to create that on a blog. A great piece of witty linkbait can be found here.

Promoting Your Blog

It’s not just users and search engines that love blogs, it’s social media too. In my last article, I touched on how Twitter is ideal for sharing linkable content – but Twitter isn’t the only game in town. Digg, Delicious and Sphinn are sites built to share links, and the blogosphere has embraced them wholeheartedly. There’s also YouTube – a place where you can share your audio-visual content, and one other little social networking site that you might have heard of…

In the next in the series, we’ll discuss social bookmarking, viral video and the undisputed king of the social media websites – Facebook.

Social Success in 2010 – Introduction

Social Success in 2010 Part One – Twitter

Social Success in 2010 Part Three – Taking Your Business to the Masses

 But is the decade of search coming to an end? If it is, what will replace it? And how will businesses need to adapt?

 Is Search Over?

In a word, no. Search makes information instantly accessible – it may adapt and advance, but it’s very unlikely that it will become obsolete. However, it’s almost certain that the days of search as the be all and end all of online interactions will come to an end.

Search and SEO will still be immensely important to success online, but they’ll need to share centre stage with a young pretender to the throne. Social Media.

How is Social Media Becoming More Important?

2009 saw the rise of Real Time Search. Bing was the first search engine to incorporate Twitter updates into their results pages, with Google following suit in December. As 2010 dawns, Google’s results now include Tweets, Yahoo Answers and news articles – as they are posted.

As real time search becomes more prevalent, companies will need to embrace it. And the easiest way to do that is through Twitter.

Interacting in Real Time – The Rise of Twitter

In 2006, a micro-blogging website crept onto the Internet and allowed users to share 140 character messages. Nobody paid much attention. Then, as the decade drew to a close, millions of people stood up and took notice. By March 2009, Twitter was the fastest growing website on the internet and businesses were signing up in their thousands.

Why? Because it let them interact with customers. From sales to customer services, the ability to see exactly what a target audience was talking about was too attractive an opportunity to pass up. But no man is an island, and no social networking tool stands alone either. If you’re going to use Twitter for your business, you’ll need linkable content.

Taking Content Off Your Website – The Rise of Blogging

At the start of the 2000s, all the content a company needed could be found on its website. As we move into the next decade, more and more content will be found on external blogs. Search engines love blogs, social networks love blogs, and users love blogs. Why?

Because they’re accessible. Where a company website is their corporate face, a blog is an altogether more personal experience. Tongues are looser (and sharper), information is more freely given and conversation flows in the comments sections. What’s more, you’re not just relying on the search engines to get your blogs found. Social networks seem tailor made to promote your blogs.

Social Networking or Corporate Opportunity?

Digg, StumbleUpon, Sphinn. These sites exist for one reason – to drive traffic towards interesting and informative pages. A stuffy corporate website won’t make waves in the social bookmarking community, but an open and entertaining blog will. And then there’s the daddy of social networking sites.

Facebook. If you’ve not heard of Facebook, congratulations on finding this blog from your cave. The chances are that you’re one of over 350 million users, so you’ll know how easy it is to communicate. And if you’ve joined the fan page of a cartoon Meerkat selling car insurance, you’ll know there’s money to be made using it.

In fact, there’s money to be made through Twitter, and through Blogging, and through Digg and YouTube and pretty much any social networking site. And from 2010 onwards, if you want to be making money online, you’ll need to embrace social media marketing.

This week, we’ll show you how.

 Where Next?

 Over the next week or so, we’ll be looking at social media in depth. Don’t forget to check back soon for the rest of the series.

Social Success in 2010 Part One – Twitter

Social Success in 2010 Part Two – Blogging

Social Success in 2010 Part Three – Taking Your Business to the Masses

As we all may or may not know, blogs are a good source of information and back linking into your site from your blog posts it builds your site’s credibility on the Internet – which is important!

Test carried out
I wanted to test whether using an external blog was better than using an internal blog. I started by creating one blog externally using one of WordPress’ domains and later added one internal blog to my actual site. Both are using WordPress so the only different factor is the domain which the blog is hosted on.

Findings
I found that the external blog was ok, but Google only picked up my post changes every month around the same time. This is fine but you obviously want your posts picked up ASAP, especially if you want to promote something on your site quickly.

I then added an internal WordPress blog a month later, which is on my own domain. WordPress gives you the files to upload; it does require some technical knowledge as you will need a MySQL database.

I then also added the XML sitemap add-on that WordPress provides; this is a must, as it tells search engines when you actually make the changes within the blog and what pages to crawl.

I found that the internal WordPress blog posts were picked up by the end of the first week in Google, which was fantastic. One obscure phrase that I knew I could get fast ranking on was my site name – which was also included in my domain. By the end of the first week the internal blog was already ranking above my own site for its own site name!

Summary
Neither of the above methods is perfect, but there is a third way to structure your blog. I have come to find that this third way is the best method as it:

A: Lets Google pick up your posts faster.
B: Improves your site’s ranking

Here’s what you need to do
Firstly, you need to create a new domain, something like [www.companyname-blog.co.uk]. Then upload the Word Press files onto this domain, get everything set up and use your new blog domain to link back into your main site. That way it will help your sites rankings, and all changes to posts will get picked up a lot quicker.

Something I have left out is back link building, this is also crucial to the blogs credibility! This I will cover in a later post, so make sure you check back soon.

How Blogs Can Work for Your Business

An increasing number of people are blogging for business, why? Well, firstly search engines love rolling content and news pages. Unlike static web pages, the benefit of a news or blog section comes from the regularly updated content and steady stream of informative articles. The great part is you can write about anything that takes your fancy, provided it is somehow related to your industry, business or products. Although you may not realise, you probably have a wealth of knowledge which the average Joe Public would need to do some serious Wiki-ing to unearth. By gradually releasing little bits of this knowledge on a regular basis, you will give search engines a very good reason to see you as an authoritative source of news and will quickly find your articles ranking well for related search terms. Blogs can be used to announce the launch of your new products, perhaps offer a review and some customer feedback or advice, or it might cover events happening in your industry or even company news. Whatever your niche, try to think about your customers and imagine what type of information they would find useful. Provided you can think of at least one type of person who would be moderately interested, you should write it!

Blogging Opens the Twitter Door

Once you are comfortable adding to your blog, the next logical step is building up your company’s official Twitter account. Twitter is so easy to use and so effective at promoting websites that some people often accuse it of being one giant spam machine. The goal is finding as many genuine followers as possible, each of who will see any updates you post. You can post short snippets of news, or links to articles in your blog. Each time you add a new blog entry, be sure to copy and paste the address of your new post into your Twitter update bar with a little text describing the article. It becomes a source of clicks for people who are interested in the headline, and there are some fantastic Twitter applications appearing that will help kick-start and manage your account. Twittgeek.com will automatically follow people based on a keyword you choose. The great thing about this is that it ensures your message reaches people who have Tweeted about this topic in the past and are most likely to be interested in what you have to say.

Social Media SEO, Social Bookmarking and Article Back-links

There are some great sites out there besides Twitter that you should be submitting each article to, instead of building links for your site itself, you will be building links for your individual articles. Each site has a certain ‘knack’ to really get the most out of your social media SEO, but all are very easy to pick up and you will often find you get used to them by simply using them. A lot of SEO experts will slate digg.com because ‘power users really need to digg your article to really feel a big effect, but there are other advantages – Digg articles themselves will often rank very quickly in Google separately from your site, and when enough people click through from your Digg entry through to your actual blog entry, eventually Google will see it should be recommending your blog page high up, and will often ‘flip’ the URLs, giving you a chance to rank for some quite competitive terms if your article is an interesting enough read. Reddit.com entries will generally not rank very well in Google, but has a fantastic number of users and does not insist on categories, allowing it to become a neat little traffic source all of it’s own. Be sure to give your articles a full description here in the ‘extra text’ section. You can submit either blog entries or entire sites to Stumble Upon, and it is worth finding several relevant categories for your article if you can! There are other generic social bookmarking sites such as delicious.com, diigo.com, Yahoo Bookmarks and Google Bookmarks that are worth using.

Making Facebook and Youtube Work For you

Facebook now allows organisations and companies to open up official Facebook accounts. This is something else that is quick to do, and quite a lot of fun. Be sure to make all employees are members of the group, so that all can contribute to your Facebook profile. Also, be sure to link back to your site and post any links to articles here too! Similarly, some may find themselves in industries where they have videos that might be uploaded to Youtube. Remember, that plenty of people use YouTube on a regular basis, and it would be worth including a link back to your site from the description of each YouTube video you post. You can also embed videos from YouTube into your site fairly easily.

Why Social Media is Best Done Yourself

In a nutshell, there are some more expensive SEO companies who will provide the social media side of SEO as part of the service. But my advice would be that social media SEO is something best done yourself. Why? Well, only you have the industry insider knowledge and deal with your customers on a regular basis, and will therefore understand them better than any SEO consultant. It is also completely free to do your social media SEO, and allocating just one hour each day, or perhaps a couple of hours each week is enough to really see a noticeable impact on your SEO.

1999 – Larry Page and Sergey Brin invent Google…

Now, a good ten years since anything of note has happened to the online world, comes another Earth-shattering and epoch-defining moment:

 October 2009 – FirstFound launch The FirstFound Blog!  

 That’s right. Leading UK search engine consultants FirstFound have finally decided to enter the blogosphere, ten years after the company first formed. Still, good things come to those who wait, and you’ll be treated to all of the SEO news, insights and tips that your heart could desire.

 That’s not all though – this isn’t just another SEO blog. We’ve put together our company’s best and brightest minds to offer everything from social media strategies and E-commerce advice to web development assistance and PPC hints. We’ll even be giving you reviews of the latest movies, and developments from the world of sport.

 What we offer isn’t set in stone. We want to hear from you, our readers, to find out what you want in a blog. If you think we’re wittering on too much about Twitter, or we’ve completely ignored an important development from Google HQ, let us know.

 For now though, sit back, relax and enjoy The FirstFound Blog. You never know. You might just learn something.

 This week, Andrew’s been working like a dog to get content ready for the site, and isn’t going to let some Johnny-come-lately steal the kudos that comes with the first post.