Firstly a Happy New Year to one and all and here’s hoping that it will be a successful one!

There are a number of major initiatives that I will be undertaking this year and one of these will be the establishing of a new blog based website focusing on the use of Business Blogging as a powerful online marketing tool called Better Business Blogging.

The site will combine an online set of information together with an email based course covering how to set up a Business Blog and the elements that you will need to consider together with a section on best use of SEO and other methods of promoting your blog and with it your business.

The course itself is a series of emails covering the following subject areas:

• Introduction to Business Blogs and their use for marketing
• Questions to consider (and answer!) before setting up a blog
• Elements to bear in mind as you set it up
• Taking the first steps
• How to keep writing and ideas to help you
• Making best use of your blog for Search Engine rankings
• Mistakes to avoid in developing your Blog
• Promoting your Business Blog
• Round up and help

The series of emails will start in the first half of February which is when the accompanying site will be going live.

If you are interested then post a comment and I can add you to the list. You will then be contacted closer to the time to check that you still wish to receive the emails when it goes live - this is so that we have full “opt-in” from people receiving it.

The site will then focus on the different marketing uses for a business blog whether you are an independent consultant looking to establish your expert credentials in your market niche or a medium sized company looking to find better ways to establish a longer term dialogue and relationship with your customers. We will look at all the aspects and how to use the Business Blog technology to achieve it.

It’s going to be good and your feedback with be much appreciated - I’ll keep you informed as to its progress.

Jakob Nielsen has turned his attention to some specific usability elements in blogs which are certainly different to those that we have come to accept when creating websites. His article outlines what he considers to be the Top Ten Design mistakes that he sees bloggers making.

Although Nielsen’s stated focus is on usability and on blogs in general, if we apply these elements to business blogs then many still remain very relevant, particularly where individual professionals or small and medium sized businesses are concerned.

1. No Author Biographies
As a small and medium sized business, one aim of your blog in terms of marketing you and your business, is to help develop a level of trust with your target audience and to demonstrate your expertise to your readers. A short biography will help substantiate this and fill in some of the details about the person. Don’t forget to put contact details there as well! You also need to make sure it’s easy for people to get in touch!

2. No Author Photo
A photo can contribute to developing that personal touch which should help to show the people behind the company face. In professional services, such as law firms or accountancies, a photo on a website can help develop a sense of trust and the same is true here. Make sure the photo portrays you in the light you would like to be seen, though!

3. Nondescript posting titles
Apart from being clear about what you are blogging about, the title is absolutely key to the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) elements within the blog. A good title should not only be a clear indicator to the reader of what the post contains but should also contain the keywords of the article to help with Search Engines.

4. Links don’t say where they go
Being able to easily find your way around a site or to other sites is fundamental to working closely with your readers and getting them to return, so make sure you “signpost” links as clearly as possible. Additionally, from an SEO standpoint again, the text you use to create the link (so called ‘anchor text’) is very valuable so use it!

5. Classic hits are buried
If there are certain key articles which any visitor to your site must read, then make sure that you highlight it on your blog. Key articles really show what you and your company are all about so make sure everyone has the opportunity to read these gems!

6. Calendar is the only navigation
Generally, when new people visit your blog, they are going to want to read your posts on certain subjects to get to understand what the focus of your blog is all about. So make sure that your categories are well named so that people can find for what they are looking for quickly and easily - then they’ll come back for more!

7. Irregular Publishing Frequency
Although publishing when you have something to say is good, regular posting is certainly beneficial so that people can know when to come back to view your updates. Of course, doing this through RSS would save them time and effort!

8. Mixing Topics
In a business blog, if you are able to keep to your specific area of expertise (your niche if you like) then this will help in your marketing efforts to position yourself as an expert in that subject area through the information that you are providing in your blog.

9. Forgetting that you write for your future boss
In the instance of a small business, you are in fact writing for your customers, present and future! Nevertheless, be very clear that anything you write can be found by them and so only write posts that you are representative of yourself and your business, as you are writing not only to them but to the world at large.

10. Having a domain name owned by a weblog service
Having control yourself of all aspects of your business is important– and a blog, with its strong marketing and PR benefits, must certainly be one of those. Therefore use a blogging system that you are able to adapt to your needs through a domain that you own.

Overall, definitely a lot of relevance there to business blogging, including a number of key elements that you should consider right from the planning stage of your blog where possible. So making sure that you consider that you will need to deal with both your readers and the Search Engines from the outset is certainly good advice.

Good to see an article on Internet News.com which indicates that Corporate Blogging takes off according to a survey which has been carried out recently. A lot of the comments that were made related to larger corporates but are just as relevant to smaller companies and business professionals as well.

The elements regarding how business blogs are being used shows that they are being employed for public relations and marketing, as well as to demonstrate thought leadership in their chosen area. It was good to see that as well as hoping to achieve improved brand recognition and external communications, blogs were also seen as a excellent vehicle for customer feedback. This last point is key again in companies of all sizes wishing to develop better relationships with their customer base.

Recently, Google has launched its Blog Search Engine which works in the same basic way as the normal Google Search Engine that we are all so familiar with, except that it only indexes blogs.

If a blog publishes a site feed in any format and automatically pings an updating service, then Google’s Blog Search Engine should be able to find it and certainly so far it seems to be doing a good job in that respect. An added feature, particularly relevant to blogs, is that it allows you to sort the results not only by relevance, but also by date.

However, this is not to discuss its relative merits but rather to highlight some of the special search operators that it has over and above those that we already have available from the main Google Search Engine – a list of these main operators can be found on Google’s site.

In addition to these, Blog Search supports the following new operators of its own:

inblogtitle:
Every blog has its own title as part of its set-up and this is what is searched through to return results. This does not refer to all that is in the “Title tag” which will vary according to the page or all that is included in the URL.

inposttitle:
This searches through the titles of the posts which are made in a blog - again this is a specific field you create when creating a post in your blog, and it is important for this and other reasons to choose an appropriate one.

inpostauthor:
This will return anything where the author’s name corresponds with the search term. For example, a search such as - emarketing inpostauthor:Mark - will return posts containing the word ‘emarketing’ which have been posted by people named ‘Mark’.

blogurl:
This does not return words which are only present in the main domain name of the blog but in the rest of the URL. In many blogging systems, this is likely to return similar results as a search using inposttitle

There is an alternative way to achieve this by using the Advanced Search option which is accessible from the main Blog Search page and will allow you to sift through the results in the same way.

All useful stuff and certainly makes it clear of the importance that Google places on the role that blogs are already playing which will no doubt develop further.