Smart Entrepreneurs Custom Brand Blogs and Tweets

I get asked all the time about blogs and why you should have, and where should it reside, and what should it include. More and more I am also fielding inquiries about Twitter and Tweets.

Both apply to each other because they are both extensions of your brand, they both thrive off engagement and interaction with readers, and they are used to promote each other. For example, many bloggers are using their blog to promote their Twitter account and gain new followers and they are using their Twitter account to promote new blog posts. Today I thought I’d share some questions I have been asked recently and provide some answers.

Blogging

Should I have my blog on my site or should it be separate?
I say do what is best and easiest for you. The benefit to having it on your site (as long as you’re posting regularly) is that is will help drive traffic to your site and increase your search engine rankings. The benefit to having it in a blogging community is that there is more visibility in that community and it then becomes another website of value (active blogs are viewed as high-value by the search egines) that is linking to your main website.

I have a blog that is separate from my website. How to use my site and my blog together?
First, make sure you avoid any disconnect with your visitors by making sure the design of your blog is complimentary to your website. Make sure the theme, color scheme and imagery on your blog are consistent with your branding on your site. They should not be exactly the same, but they should clearly be identified as elements of the same brand. Link them together and talk about your blog on your site and in your newsletter and talk about or reference resources on your site in your blog. For example you could have a feed of recent blog posts on your website, and a list of resources available on your website in a widget on your blog.

What domain should I use for my blog?
Make sure the web address of your blog matches your site address. If it is on your website, use www.mydomain.com/blog. Don’t use a blog address with wordpress, blogger, blogspot etc. in the address if it is separate from your website – it is unprofessional. Get your blog on a custom domain. For example if your site is www.freejewelry.com, then your blog could be www.freejewelryblog.com or www.blog.freejewelry.com. Hosting your blog on www.yourname.com is also a popular solution for many entrepreneurs because it is their thoughts, expertise and insights being shared.

Can I put my opt-in box on my blog?
YES! You can put your opt-in on your blog, you can link your social networking profiles, you can add recommended resources, pretty much anything you want to add, you can. Some may just take a little more time to integrate than others. WordPress in particular has a huge variety of plugins available that gives you a huge amount of flexibility to customize your blog.

Tweeting (My handle: @jenniferbourn):

What is Tweeting?
Tweeting is the action you take on the social media site Twitter. What is Twitter? If you use Facebook, Twitter can best be described at status updates. When you post an update on Twitter, it is called a Tweet and it must be less than 140 characters long. Although, if you want other people to retweet (forward) your tweet (post), you should keep your tweet to about 120 characters in length to allow room for their twitter handle (user name) to be added. Twitter is a quick and easy way to get out a message, tip, trick, quote, link, message etc. Twitter is being used by many entrepreneurs to foster new relationships, share information, and learn new infomation as well. Instead of friends, on Twitter you have followers. If you sign up to follow them, you are signing up to receive their tweets

What else can Twitter do?
The cool thing here is that people can reply to your tweet, retweet (forward) your tweet to their followers, send direct (private) messages to specific people and more. You can send in your tweets from a variety of third party sites, by SMS on your mobile phone or right on the Twitter website. Twitter is being used for market research, surveys, quick feedback on an idea, customer service, crisis communications, publica relations, marketing, social enjoyment, and learning.

How do you brand twitter?
Well there are a few ways to do this. First, you can customize your Twitter profile page design. A designer can create a background for your profile that represents your brand, matches your website and blog, includes your photo, website links, info about you, and more. Second, you can stay on topic (for the most part) of what service and product. You can tweet valuable content and links, reinforcing your expert status. You can also group tweets using a hashtag (#). For example #Designtips could be a hashtag I’d use. If I did, I would put that tag (#Designtips) in each tweet I send out with a design tip. Other Twitter users can then do a search on your hashtag and see all of the Tweets you have posted.

How to I manage all this social networking stuff?
Third party applications baby! Here are my three favorites:

• With Tweetdeck using Twitter is a breeze. Download the app onto your desktop and get Twitter organized! It breaks up all of the tweets into categories, like tweets, replies, direct messages, popular topics and more, making it easier to tweet and connect. TweetDeck will also notify you when someone you follow has posted a new tweet or someone has sent you a reply or direct message.
• At Ping.fm you can create an account and link it to all of your social networks – facebook, linkedin, plaxo, twitter, etc. The idea is that you can log into Ping.fm and post one status update/post/feed and it will automatically broadcast that post to your social networks. So When I post to Ping.fm, it updates my facebook status, my linked in status, my plaxo update, and my Twitter tweets.
• Hootsuite allows you to track multiple Twitter accounts, preschedule tweets, search keywords, and more. You can also link your Ping.fm account to Hootsuite with your Ping.fm API key, making it easy to preschedule your posts to hit all of your social networks.