By Greg Balanko-Dickson

I was wondering what might happen if a blog or website had a set of help pages?

We expect help pages when using a software or web application. We see About pages and FAQ on blogs but how often do we see a set of “Help” pages on a business blog? Never?

Thoughts Driving This Idea

For all the hype around social networking applications and web 2.0, the social part of networking online only happens when two people connect in real time - during a synchronous conversation - happening at the same time. Examples of synchronous conversations include instant messages, in-person meetings, phone calls, and Skype calls.

Whereas, asynchronous communications do not happen at the same time. Examples include blog posts, commenting, voice mail, email, forum posts and comments.

In my opinion, no matter how many comments and social networking widgets we have on a business blog it is at best a lukewarm experience and asynchronous. It is only when a human reaches out to initiate a conversation with another human and they connect in real time is a real relationship formed - and an experience created.

Business Websites and Blogs Should Be More Welcoming

I think we still have a long, long way to go to make our blogs and websites a great, positive experience for our readers. One of the great shifts in business and marketing strategy is the increasing importance to add experiential ingredients to the customer experience.

Customers are quite observant, they notice when a business goes the extra mile, puts out a massive effort, or does something that just is considerate, visionary, and just makes sense. Which is what adding a set of help pages to our blogs will accomplish - impress the heck out of our prospects and customers.

So What Should Be On A Bloggers Help Page(s)?

We could invest in creating tutorials on the how, what, when, where, and why visitors should subscribe to my RSS feed. How to find the feed on a blog, explain what a feed reader is, and review different types of feed readers. Define my blogs comment and spam policy, how often I plan to post and the topics I cover.

I could even develop a tutorial about how to use the content and advice you find on my blog. Explain what types of people visit my blog and purchase my services/products. Another example, I could share information on how to get the most from my books and coaching services. How to get the most from the blog, how to reach me, and disclose my policy on customer satisfaction, returns, and refunds.

I wonder if this is a waste of time or an idea whose time has come, what do you think?

By Greg Balanko-Dickson

Lorelle mentioned in an email today, “I’ve been asked by many readers that they would love to crawl inside your head and find out how you write content.”

I have long thought about sharing my approach. Lorelle’s email got my attention today and I decided that it would be as good a day as any other to write about how I develop and write content for my blog(s).

A Wee Bit of History

I have been writing daily online since 1998 when I wrote a “Business Tip of the Day”. I used it as an opportunity to journal my experiences working as a business coach. It quickly became invaluable tool for extracting and documenting what I was learning developing my business and coaching clients (anonymously of course).

I made a commitment to always write a new article for the next “Business Tip of the Day” before I went to bed. I worked that way for almost 6 years. Honestly, there were days I did not feel like writing. The personal commitment I made required I press through because otherwise my site would produce a MySQL error - not good for the loyal readers - here is a list of concepts and tools

Writing Concepts and Tools

As I was editing this post I was surprised at how many different strategies I utilize to inventory writing ideas and the tools I use to write them.

Right now, I track and read 88 Blogs plus major business sites including USA Today, Business Week, and other business blogs. I read other blogs mostly to make sure I am in touch with the market, to leave supportive comments, and once in awhile I come across a really good post that I want to share with my readers. In those cases I tag specific stories, articles, or posts using del.icio.us tag, “article ideas”.

My greatest resource for writing ideas is what I learn as a result of coaching my clients or as a result of running my own business.

Often I get motivated to write about a new topic. I take time to research the topic to see who and what is being said. I use DevonAgent to spider the web for content ideas as the results are much more accurate than any search engine especially when I use a NEAR parameter - this function allows me to find content that I would not otherwise be able to easily find via any search engine.
When I am stuck on an idea and find myself looking at a blank page, I turn to my Dictionary and Thesaurus. A Thesaurus helps me get my thoughts organized because the words referenced in a Thesaurus are all within the same general concept.

Occasionally, I will start a post using a Dictionary definition because it gets me to the root meaning, background of the word, and the ‘concept’ of the word(s). I find it really frees my mind because those other ‘words’ stimulate other connected ideas and concepts that I might not have considered in my article. I prefer to use Visual Thesaurus or the Widget on the Dashboard of my Apple MacBookPro.

I often create Mind Maps (Mind Manager) for complex articles, concepts, and issues. They work just as well when I just need to get an idea out of my head so I can begin to work on it. Then I export it to a RTF format and begin writing.

These days, I sit down and begin writing. I start with a certain theme, meme, presumption, and write. When I go back to edit I am often surprised to observe that by the end of the post it evolved into something quite different. In those cases the time spent writing doubles as a bit of education.

Depending on my mood, I will use Omni Outliner to create a basic structure for the article. I then export export it to a RTF format and then begin to write in one of three tools. I use MacJournal sometimes because it will post directly to WordPress by clicking a button. These days I tend to not use MacJournal because I find that I need to go and login anyways because I have to add other blog features i.e. add the post to a “series” or add keywords via Ultimate Tag Warrior.

Today, I am using VooDoo from Flying Meat as my writing application. It is a desktop Wiki that allows me to organize, link to, and keep a copy of my writing for myself all within one document. I had no idea I was such a writing geek and had so many writing tools [read toys].

Writing Style

My blog writing is part journal, enlightened opinion, educational, or an indepth series about a particular topic. According to Lorelle:

“Greg Balanko-Dickson teaches the domino effect in his essays. Fix one thing and other things will start to fix themselves. Take it step-by-step and stay focused. Most of all, when you do good works in your life, you inspire others to do good works, and you attract a lot of good work to you. It’s really inspirational writing as well as motivational.

He also specializes in what I call ‘kick ass’ inspiration. If you need some kicking to get you off your butt and into action, Greg is the source for good butt kicking.” - Lorelle on WordPress

Share Your Experience

Do you use any of the tools or strategies mentioned? If so, which ones, and how might you be using them a bit differently?

Information geeks unite!

Greg Balanko-Dickson is author of two business books, third generation entrepreneur and The Remote Control CEO.

By Greg Balanko-Dickson

I came across an essay titled Economics of the Blogosphere, authored by David S. Evans who is co-author of the book Catalyst Code: The Strategies Behind the World’s Most Dynamic Companies.

The blogosphere is one of the biggest and most influential global industries created in the last decade. Technorati tracks almost 100 million blogs and estimates that about 20 percent of blogs are active in the sense that they were updated in the last 90 days. Via Economics of the Blogosphere

Yesterday I asked “Who do you trust?” because when I was looking at this chart from eMarketer I found it interesting that the number of people who trust ’strangers with experience’ as a source for information - nearly doubled since 1997.

In my opinion, blogs still have a long way to go as we are slightly more trusted than advertising but only half as often as TV news reporters - we have come a long way but we still have a long way to go.

David says that according to “comScore, blogs accounted for slightly more than a third of the 173 billion US Internet visitors in May 2006.” which means that blogs are major competition for advertisers who are trying to reach the same people.

In Economics of the Blogosphere, David says that “about 10% of blogs make money from advertising but few of those make enough to pay their operators the minimum wage.” My experience confirms that his estimate is reasonably accurate. So, this means that most bloggers have a different motivation driving their passion for blogging.

The Other Blogging Currency (reasons people blog)

We all have our own reasons for spending a significant portion of our lives reading and writing our own blogs. David writes that people are motivated to blog for the following reasons:

• Blog to influence.
• Blog for fame.
• Blog for reputation.
• Blog to enhance another business or sell another product.
• Blog for information.
• Blog for interactions.

Before I ever started blogging I wrote the “Business Tip of the Day” for five years. I had 3,000 subscribers which was pretty good in those days but there was no ‘conversation’. While looking for a easy way to replace my content management system I discovered WordPress and my blogging journey began.

Why I Blog

I find that blogging keeps me connected to business owners and entrepreneurs that are reading my blog and it consistently provides qualified leads for my business coaching practice. In 2005 I placed adsense on my blog and can say that it paid my mortgage, groceries, and gas for the car. But I found it became a distraction because I was so obsessed with maximizing click-throughs, the quality of my writing slipped.

From Distraction to Focus

I made a decision to remove all advertising because I felt an internal conflict - do I write to maximize click-through or to help the readers? I was not able to easily overcome that internal conflict and it really bugged me - so to keep myself intellectual honest, I removed all advertising.

I no longer have any confusion over why and who I am writing for - I eliminated the internal conflict.

As soon as I made that decision and removed all the ads and started promoting the Business Plan Coach ebook - I got a contract from McGraw-Hill Trade to write my first book about buying a business and last year I finished my second about how to write an effective business plan.

Interesting how that works isn’t it? I believe that once I got clear about why I was writing - I attracted a book contract from one of the worlds largest publishers.

I challenge you to think about and answer this question, “How can I become more focused and on purpose with my blogging?”

By Greg Balanko-Dickson

A reminder to keep it simple.

While awaiting the arrival of Lorelle’s blogging book, I flipped open What No One Ever Tells You About Blogging and Podcasting by Ted Demopoulos. In writing his book, Ted Demopoulos interviewed a bunch of people about blogging. These gems come courtesy Guy Kawasaki:

Evangelizing your blog is tip # 59. I felt this tip was so strong that Lorelle would not mind me sharing it, despite that it comes from a competitive book.

“Think of your blog as a product. It’s tough to market crap.” And Kawasaki suggests that you “market the crap out of it”. What I like about this concept is the simplicity of it. Demopoulos writes “Every time you’re writing a post, think about whether anyone will care. If no one will care, you’ve got a poor product.”

“Think of your blog as a book,” not a diary. Diaries are written with the expectation that no one will ever read them. A blog on the other hand is designed to be read and interacted with by allowing people to leave comments.

Personally, I like to start a blog post by asking myself, “What is it about this (topic, post, idea) that people care about?” It helps me get into the mindset of the reader.

Remember, the reader and your future customer does not care about you!

They care about themselves, their needs and wants. In my experience, taking on the customers mindset while I write keeps it simple and interesting too.

By Greg Balanko-Dickson

Courtesy Tadeusz Szewczyk of onReact.com by way of GoogleBlogoscoped, ProBlogger tipped me off to Tadeusz post titled 10 Steps to Success on the ’Net Without SEO:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as we know and detest it is obsolete in this day and age. When some while ago Philipp asked me to write an article “How do I optimize websites” I couldn’t do it: The way SEO works in Germany on Google.de can not really work for international websites in English. Moreover nowadays you do not need conventional SEO tactics to have success on the Net or in Google. In order to make a site succeed in these times you have to forget everything you know about on page optimization and link building first. Via 10 Steps to Success on the ’Net Without SEO

Is spent a lot of my time from 1998-2005 optimizing my (what was then) web site - it was very time consuming and hard work. I was writing daily anyways but when I converted my website to a WordPress blog my life got a whole lot simpler. I stopped optimizing and just wrote my heart out - it worked.

Tadeusz Top 10 List

Make sure you check out 10 Steps to Success on the ’Net Without SEO because the details and his reasons for each of the ten points are included. Here they are:

1. Discover your niche
2. Use WordPress
3. Create a killer CSS design and submit it to CSS galleries
4. Allow trackbacks, use dofollow
5. Socialize, write comments and link other blogs
6. Include social media on your site, use social media yourself
7. Write your own content, say something new, express yourself
8. Compile what you know or what others said and publish it
9. Contribute to your favorite online publications
10. Add new content at least every second day

The only point I take issue with is # 3 because I have a love/hate relationship with themes. There is not doubt that Tadeusz is 100% right in stating that creating a killer WordPress theme will help your Page Rank with all those inbound links from your design - I am not a designer. Argh! I love WordPress but there are so many badly designed and broken (CSS & HTML) themes I want to puke on them (mine included).

That said, if you hunt around, you can find a few themes that are compliant and cross browser compatible, but I digress.

I like playing around with CSS, perhaps I should team up with a programmer familiar with WordPress and see if we can collaborate on a theme and we would both win.

Hmmm… any takers?

Disclaimer

In many respects Tadeusz points are common sense, kind of boring, and hard work but is worth the effort because then you can forget about SEO and just do what we bloggers do best - read, write and relate!

By Greg Balanko-Dickson

I have been writing online daily since 1998 and only converted to blogging in 2005. In the last two years things have changed considerably and I would do things differently. This all started with reading a post courtesy Steve @ Micro Persuasion:

…the world now tuns faster. The blogosphere has transformed from the NFL to a quicker style of play that more closely resembles Arena League Football. Thanks to micro-blogging and social networks Web 2.0 is now more about rapid exchanges and it’s very mobile too. I am not the only one who notices how the sphere is changing. Jeremiah says MicroMedia is taking hold. This is all transforming how I express myself online. I learn new things faster and easier than I did before through real-time microblogged conversations. Today on Twitter, for example, we discovered that Google is indexing some Twitter streams and blogs in under 30 minutes. Via Micro Persuasion

Scanning a couple hundred feeds daily, coaching clients, working on a new business web application, and writing my next book The Remote Control CEO keeps me busy to say the least.

Blog Long, Twitter Short

If you asked me for a blog and business development strategy, I would say follow Steve’s example and use Twitter or Pownce to build relationships and your social network - then use your blog for longer posts.

I have always been a longer post guy, articles really. I can see how Twitter would help me to be more succinct. Now just have to make some room in my day to make Twitter a habit.

By Greg Balanko-Dickson, Professional Business Coach

Own a business? Have a blog? As a business owner, you are writing and blogging as part of your marketing and online promotion. There was a time when a blogging purest might have said that business and blogging should never mix.

Today, blogging and business go hand in hand.

People Don’t Care How Much You Know

Your customer, prospect, or blog reader does not care about you, they care about themselves and their needs. As the adage says:

People Don’t Care How Much You Know, Until They Know How Much You Care - anonymous

Leave the bravado, self promotion, and broad sweeping generalizations for the competition. Write with purpose, write with the consumer in mind.

Forget Me Not: The Cautious Consumer

The constant barrage of marketing and advertising has trained our culture well, too well, the audience reading your blog have well developed crap detectors - they are looking for the genuine article, the real deal, and business people who care.

First Build Trust

We must give people a reason to trust our writing. The easiest way to accomplish that is to provide value. Help them by providing information that they can put to use and use immediately.

Rapport Develops Over Time

When every post you write provides your readers with value the trust grows into rapport. A harmonious relationship where you show you understand the reader and they know you understand and care about them. I call it the currency of every business relationship - trust and rapport.

Writing Is Work

Writing original content for your blog is hard work. It takes time, thoughtful consideration, and energy. As William Zinsser says, “Writing is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.”

If you are going to take the time, effort, and energy to write, why not make sure it builds your reputation at the same time? Create trust and rapport by providing useful, practical, and meaningful information.

Authored by Greg Balanko-Dickson, a Professional Business Coach, author, and entrepreneur.

© 2007 All rights reserved.

By Greg Balanko-Dickson 

I am not a 'relationship geek' but I have been thinking a lot about how a 'information geek' can build relationships online and in the process identified a trend that is growing. Sunday I posted my thoughts and observations in Relationship 2.0 and Why Link Love is Dying and judging by the response, it seems to have struck a cord.

Blogging Is Having a Global Warming Effect

I am not talking about the environmental effects of global warming but the impact that relationship geeks are having via blogging - they are warming up the world wide web. For example, May 1st. was blogtipping day. The next official blogtipping day is June 1st. What the heck is blog tipping?

Blogtipping as defined via BusinessBlogWire

"The first calendar day of each month will be a special day for sneaking up behind three other bloggers and giving them each three good compliments and a gentle "tip." If they happen to fall over, that's just part of the fun! And hopefully a good habit of reaching out to encourage someone else will prevail."

I have been writing online since 1998 and authored two books in the last 14 months. So I am sure you can see how important words are to me and writing as much as I do, I spend more time in front of the computer than people. Eventually, even I have to come up for air and make contact with a warm human being, else I loose my mind. Blogtipping is just one of the ways that I will be using to add my own type of warmth to the web.

The other way is of course to write about topics that I am enthusiastic and passionate about and in the process help someone find the information they are looking for and help them grow and connect.

Relationship 2.0 Will Trump Link Love

Link love is not dead, yet. As the Relationship 2.0 movement builds momentum link love will be redefined from just being a search engine optimization strategy to a relationship network of communication, collaboration, and confidence via relationships - which is the first step toward trust, the 'real' currency of doing business online.

In the beginning the web was dominated by IT geeks. Increasingly, relationship geeks are blogging. This trend is simply reflecting real life. As more relationship geeks begin to leverage blogging technology the relationships they build online will create new momentum. The new metric will be the number of friends in your network not the number of incoming, one-way links. Don't say I did not tell you. ☺

By Greg Balanko-Dickson

Often forgotten when writing for your blog is getting the word out and promoting it. Phil Gerbyshak (via Make It Great!) makes five points and states you should:

• Post Often.
• Join a Blog Network.
• Sign your posts in the blog network
• Comment on other's blogs using your URL and a valid email.
• Write from your heart.

Inspiration for his post was via Guy Kawasaki and his Top 10 'How to Evangelize a Blog'. Both got me thinking and I was reminded how easy it is to be lazy (via Am I a Lazy Writer) and after writing forgetting to invest in evangelizing your posts.

Evangelizing Is Equally Important as Writing for Your Blog

When I had a web development business I always told my clients that they should invest an equal amount of money in internet marketing as they did building their website. The same is true with a blog, spend the same amount of time evangelizing your blog as you do writing for it.

If you got something worthwile to say then it is a respectable thing to promote it because then you get to help people and in the process increase your traffic, exposure, and meet new people. Who would've guessed? Hmm…
Now all I have to do is remember to Break My Mental Constipation and overcome complacency. That is the other problem with writing often, you might actually write some good stuff that will remind you what you need to be doing.

When was the last time you read your blog? I mean actually read it and go through the archives?

I know what I am going to be doing once I finish writing and evangelizing, I am going to read my blog. I wonder what I might find in the process?

By Special Guest Greg Balanko-Dickson - Remote Control CEO

Sometimes we pollute our blogs, albeit unknowingly. I originally got the idea for this article over at Newsome.org, where Ken writes about The Real Reason Blogging is Hard and he states:

“And just like any other upward climb, it’s not just about moving up the hill. It’s also about trying not to fall back down the hill, due to exhaustion, boredom or both.”

He goes on to talk about how Steve Rubel has built a blogging empire and it is true that Steve follows The Four P’s which are:

Passionate - Write about issues that are near and dear to your heart
Purposeful - Make sure you keep the end in mind; why are you blogging?
Present - Keep an eye on what’s topical today
Positional - Take a stand on an issue and follow it

Who Are You and Why Should I Care?

This might seem like a silly thing to say but if you think about it, this is the fundamental question people have the very first time they meet you, whether its networking or by visiting your blog.

If You Don’t Know The Purpose of Your Blog Neither Will Those Reading It

Perhaps I have stated the obvious but really, if you cannot decide what the purpose of your blog is then you will struggle to write meaningful, focused content.

I have been writing an article-a-day about small business issues since 1998. In the beginning I was writing to attract visitors to my ‘portal’, which required I write about a broad range of topics and therein was the trap - trying to be everything to everyone. It was time to get more specific.

So I Started to Build My Brand as the “Business Plan Coach”

Eventually I got it down to a focus on ‘business planning’ which made a big difference both in traffic and inquiries. It appeared that I was headed in the right direction, except there was one small problem.

People have a negative connotation toward business planning but I did not realize it at the time.

When combined with the fact that it took $10,000-$20,000 of time to write a custom business plan for people that were only willing to pay $3,500-$5,000 and you have a real business problem.

This only added to my confusion and identity crisis which added to more pollution on my business blog. Part of my problem with the content of my blog was that I could not make up my mind about ‘what business I wanted to be in’ never mind figuring out what to blog about.

The Beginning of Clarity

I finally resolved my confusion and identity crisis by focusing on being congruent instead of trying to be everything to everyone. It was still a long process of introspection, market research, and studying keywords people were using when searching for help with their business.

Clarity Is a Virtue In Life and In Writing

Now, the purpose of my blog is clear - to educate business owners about Business Performance Coaching while building a relationship with readers. I am in it for the long haul because I am sowing good seed - seeds of information - because a better informed business owner makes a good customer.

Through a little TLC and with some good ”weather’ the information, knowledge, and education I provide on my blog reaps a harvest. In the meantime I keep quietly tending my garden.

Clarity is a virtue in business, marketing, and writing. You can stop the pollution in your blog by being congruent and narrowing your focus. This will invigorate your spirit and generate more passion, which will attract purposeful visitors - a classic example of when less becomes more.

In the last 12 months I wrote two books and in the process narrowed my focus further to ‘Business Performance Coaching‘ and business has never been better and I am having the time of my life.

Prevent Blog Pollution

If you think of your blog as your ‘pool’, you want to keep it nice and clean because you will be ’swimming’ in it plus when others come to splash around a clean blog is an invitation to stay and hang out. Remember, how Steve Rubel set out the four ‘P’s’? Passion, Purpose, Present, and Positional.

Follow Steve’s points and you will make a positive contribution with your blog and build your business because I know from my own experience that if you build it they will come.

By Greg Balanko-Dickson, LPBC - More Profit, Less Stress, Guaranteed!