Blogs

One the biggest benefits of using a blog as a business platform is that the content is dynamic, which means it gets indexed quickly by search engines. Do you ever turn this to your advantage when it comes to current events?

Volcanic Ash

You'll have read about the problems in Europe with the volcanic ash from Iceland halting air travel earlier this month. As soon as the topic hit the news, we realised that it would be something people would be desperately searching for information about. It seemed logical to try to get our travel blog ranking well for likely terms - people would be looking for information about their upcoming vacations, or trying to find a way to get home, and locals would be wondering what to do about friends and relatives due here or stuck with them on the island.

Our strategy was simply to second guess what people would be searching on and then to try to get relevant posts ranking well. We started with the obvious airport ones like:

• Lanzarote airport arrivals
• Arrecife airport departures. Then we moved to specific ones like.
• Ash Lanzarote
• .and other similar ones

We were already ranking quite well on the airport terms, but we gave them a push anyway, and we also wrote a post about the Ash and the effect on travel to and from here. As a result we moved onto the front page of Google for all the airport terms, and got to number one (and remain there today) for the search term "Ash Lanzarote."  read more »

I've recently been offered the chance to buy a small business. It's a coffee shop / sandwich bar / free wi-fi place, and I met with the owners last week. The background to how this came about, and what I plan to do about it aren't relevant to this post, but if you're subscribed to my newsletter, I'll let you know all about it in the next one. You can join the community using the form to your right.

Image: Gregory Szarkiewicz / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Of course, I wanted lots of information to enable me to make an informed decision, so we had a meeting for them to talk me through what the business is currently doing. Imagine this scenario, if you will:

"The business is doing really well - we get an average of 56 customers per day, and 4 or 5 pleasant comments in our guest book. We're focusing really hard on increasing those daily customers to 70, and we've embarked on a program designed to get more and more people to write in the guestbook."  read more »

The second best book about blogging has had a makeover and been re-launched as a second edition.

Problogger - Secrets for blogging your way to a six figure income is written by my friends Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett.

The new edition features a whole new chapter on social media, a case study of Darren's four years running Digital Photography School, as well as lots of updates on recent new tools, new photos and screenshots and a general sweep through of all the things that have changed since the original launched a couple of years ago.

Darren and Chris have also put together some bonus material on a special new website for anyone who buys the book. The bonuses include interviews with other bloggers and some extra teaching.

If you already have the first book, then it's worth getting the latest version, and if you don't well you really should get yourself a copy of it now!  read more »

There are all kinds of blog posts - here are a few:

• The list post
• The crowd sourcing post (hint: this is one of those)
• The video post
• The audio post
• The information post
• The "how to" post
• The linkbait post
• The interview post

OK, I'm bored now, but you get the picture, so here's my question:

What type of post consistently brings you good traffic?

I'm not even going to start you off this week - I'll add my answer later on in comments.

One other thing, while you're here. Are you a member of the Mike's Life community yet? If not, you should join us now.

I could tell you that I'm going to be giving something amazing away to the whole community in May, but instead I'll tell you that people email me all the time to say that my newsletter is a really good read. So come on board and try it out for a few weeks, I'm confident you'll enjoy it, and if you don't, you can unsubscribe in two shakes of a cat's tail.  read more »

I don't know if you caught Nathan's post about How to JV your way to success - if not you should check it out.

In it, he joked that I am Robin to his Batman - of course we all know that in reality I would be Batman, don't we?

 read more »

On Saturday, I did some ocean swim training with a guy who is getting ready for the Ironman triathlon next month. He's much younger and a hundred times fitter than me, but he dislikes the swim phase of the event the most. It's not just the swimming either - he (and this is quite common) doesn't really like swimming in the ocean because of "what's down there."

My last words to him as we entered the water were:

"Remember, you can't win the event on the swim phase, but you can lose it."

And we got our heads down and started out.  read more »

You may remember I featured a video by Portico Quartet a few months ago, and this prompted another reader to send me some information about London based instrumental group Sankorfa.

The band is made up of graduates from the Guildhall School of Music, and they have played everywhere from The Royal Albert Hall to The Camden Jazz Cafe.

Their EP releases tomorrow, and you can find out more about them here: http://www.sankorfa.com/

Enjoy the video.  read more »

For almost a year, I've been trying to decide between an iPhone and a new Blackberry, and I finally chose the BB this week. In the end it made sense for two key reasons. Firstly as a Blackberry user for five years, there is no learning curve for me, and secondly the build quality of Blackberries is simply awesome. My current Curve is two years old (I've NEVER had a phone for that long) and everything still works, despite abuse you would not believe.

With that decision made, it's time for the big one boys and girls.

I need to get a new desktop computer.

  Versus   

   read more »

Do you remember my post about Dave the salesman, and about how he focused on his core principles to be successful?

I've done some work with him recently, and with several other businesses, and we've been setting them up to use Twitter as a prospecting tool.

Dave had always used telephone books as his main source of prospecting, and it's worked for years for him. He basically works his way through a list of companies (he sells photocopiers) and contacts them to find out what type of machine they use now, how they get on with it, and who the decision maker is. It's a numbers game. Every now and then he gets lucky and finds someone who is on the point of looking for a new machine, but most of the time he's simply adding the information to his database, and then following up at regular intervals hoping to catch them at "the right time."

Twitter search has added a whole new dimension for him - he can now catch people at the point they need his help, simply by setting up a Twitter search! I just put the word "photocopier" into Twitter to give you an example, and here's what I got:

 read more »

I had a really interesting conversation with a friend of mine recently. He's a self employed locksmith, and like many friends, he was fascinated to know more about how I make a living online.

We were talking about some of the products I sell, and at one point I said to him (only slightly tongue in cheek) "You really ought to set up a blog for your business, and you should start by buying my Beginner's Guide to Blogging."

His reply was "Bloody hell Mike, I'm not going to spend $47 learning how to set up a blog!"  read more »