To humanize (or humanise for us Brits I guess) your business blog means to put more than just what your company does and how it works. It means including your face, a business bio and making it more personable to you for your audience.

Seth Godin (my guru) says this…

“The only alternative is to humanize our work. To create something that only you could have made, or said, or conceived of. When it looks and feels like you, when you are the trusted source (not an anonymous trademark) then you are on the spot, under pressure and deservedly valued.”  - Source : Seth Godin – Humanize it

Here are five simple ways to humanise your blog:

If you have staff include them

I worked with a client in Edinburgh who used a photo of all the people who worked in his business as their main business image. It is a really lovely way to humanize your business online. Of course if you have a high turnover of staff it can be an expensive way. At the very least include photos of your staff members on your ‘about us’ page so people can see who does what in your company.

Your About Me Page

Yes, like me, you may be a micro business being run from home but people still want to know about you. Not just what you can do but a bit of personal stuff too so they can get to know the person behind a business.

Have conversations with followers

Whether a follower is someone who comments on your blog or a person who is on your Facebook page if people make the effort to leave a comment make sure you reply so they are not left there hanging. It means keeping an eye on all your social media presence if you don’t have someone to do that for you and the easiest way is to use the same email address (can be worth having a separate one to your main email address) and have all your messages coming into one account. That way whatever happens you will always be kept informed.

Avoid jargon if you can

Whenever possible keep it simple and talk to people like they are people rather than robots – it really helps. You are looking to build relationships with potential clients as well as stay in touch with current ones so do what you can to lay off the jargon or explain it whenever possible. Sometimes words may be essential to the industry that can be seen as jargon. If I talk about WordPress or blog themes some people still have that glazed look as they have no clue about them yet they are essential words to help my blog get found in the search engines. I just lay off using them as much as I possibly can or use them sparingly. If you can it will help your business if you can do the same thing.

Provide content so you make a different not just market yourself

It is nice to have a balance between what you write to promote yourself (e.g. next week our event takes place at abc etc) or because you are helping the people reading your blog post (e.g. check out how to do this handy tip…) because people like to read interesting, entertaining and informative content. Hopefully you know what your audience prefers to read about and you can maintain a balance so that you are not 100% buy this stuff all the time.

Always review your message

I am no branding expert but I do know businesses change. As you go from working alone at home to running a shop or owning premises your message will change. Make sure you take a look at your online presence and see whether it still fits into what you are doing now.

Yes, I know that was actually six ways, I like to over deliver on promises

When it comes to connecting with your audience online you can go some way towards humanising your business blog by putting more of your heart and soul into it and less of the specific “what we do” type stuff. In doing that, you break down barriers, make it easier for people searching online for products and services to get to know and trust you plus it is far more fun. Humanising your business blog means you get to be playful with the information you put out there.

I started using social media and I went through various training programs influence was about the numbers, how many people you had following you, we were encouraged to connect and follow each other.

Now, many of us know that numbers mean nothing (although some people are still impressed by it) and online influence is not about the numbers but about the number of people who follow you and take action as a result of what you say and encourage them (your follower) to do.

I wanted to get an idea of what online influence is and what other professionals think it should be …

How Influence SHOULD Work

http://www.chrisbrogan.com3/12/13

I know, because I’ve worked on helping people raise money online for years now. … The Psychology of Influence. I’m not rewriting Cialdini’s book here, and I’m not even looking to mirror any of his findings. In fact, there are plenty of great books on influence that bear reading. In fact, if you’re in marketing and sales and you’re not reading more books on psychology and fewer books on “social media,” then I’m not sure what you’re hoping to accomplish. But that said, let’s …

Online Influence and Smoke-Filled Back Rooms

http://inklingmedia.net3/5/13

Can social influence be measured? And if so, how? If not, is it possible to harness the power of influence?

A business blog can become a wonderful way to develop influence

While there are many questions being asked about much online influence social media actually gives us, research has found that a blog is still more influential as long as you are providing value and building strong relationships with your readers. Blogs have an influence on the purchasing decision of a consumer and are now the third most influential digital resource when making overall purchases (31%) behind retail sites (56%) and brand sites (34%). Blogs were found to be the fifth most trustworthy source overall for information on the internet.

Blogs Outrank Social Networks for Consumer Influence: New …

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com3/6/13

… her own small community. If you want to become more influential with your online community, focus on providing value, building strong relationships (with your followers and other trusted bloggers) and offering great content.

Unfortunately, when it comes to online budget spend only 11% of the budget goes towards focusing on blogging and blog influence. Now that their influence has been established maybe that might increase. With online advertising while 57% of a budget is allocated towards Facebook only 6% of that budget is allocated to online spending using banner ads on blogs.

Maybe that 6% would like to keep the fact that they are raking in the money very quiet

The report was put together by Technorati and can be found here

“In short, where brands are spending is not fully aligned with how and where consumers are seeing value and being influenced”
- TechnoratiMedia – 2013 digital influence report

Why do consumers follow blogs?

• 41% to keep up with activities
• 61% of them to learn about a product/service
• 21% to make purchases

Influencers blog

More good news for blogs. Influencers are most active on blogs and 86% of them say they have a blog, with a third of influencers saying they have been blogging for five or more years. Most bloggers (52%) operate two to five blogs which makes me feel better about my serial blogging

These bloggers are still sticking to writing their blog posts (86%) with 10% using video as their primary method and only 4% using audio.

When it comes to WHAT they post influencers write their own original content (74%) and also link to articles written by others (38%)

Generating revenue

When it comes to generating an income using a blog Facebook (92%) and Twitter (83%) are still the best way to go. They create the most referrals, shares and revenue. That is having your own blog and promoting what you write on these platforms.

More than 80% of bloggers said they earn less than $10,000 per year and 52% of blogs make less than $1,000 a year. Not great in terms of making money with a blog. However, for the big earners 7% are earning $30,000-$100,000 and 4% earning $100,000 or more.

How do most of the influential bloggers earn their income?

Banner advertising (61%) and text ads (51%) plus affiliate programs (41%) – product brand-sponsored content and reviews came in 4th and 5th. Collecting subscription fees (e.g. membership sites) was only 7%

A service not mentioned was consultancy. 80% of my income comes from the consultancy work that I do and my work puts me into the 7% of bloggers earning $30,000-$100,000 however what I actually want is to earn income from advertising, affiliate fees and banner ads where there is little to do except put up a banner!

I set up and manage WordPress blogs for business professionals selling a product and service.

They can enjoy their own hosting account or set up their blog on my WordPress blogging platform

and if they are not sure which to go with they contact me.

I have always been an advocate for the blog even when everyone was rushing off to set up Facebook pages and Twitters account. Yes, these are great for bringing people TO your blog but not having your own web presence is a huge mistake. Not writing valuable content on your blog that helps the reader is another because it really does help with building trust and influence.

Have you ever wondered what keywords are and how they help your local business blog get found online? Well, I am about to help you get the answer to that.

There is a message I want to get across to all owners of a local business blog and it focuses on the importance of keywords to help you get found in the search results by people searching for your local event, product and/or service.

Blogging is all about writing a message and if you are writing a message you want to make sure your message gets out to the right people. The only way to do that is to write a message not based on what you want to write but based on what people are searching for – you need to write keyword optimised blog posts….. at least most of the time!

I use the 80 / 20 rule. At least 80% of my post titles will contain a keyword and the rest of the time it won’t because it doesn’t fit the situation or because I want to write something funny as a title but funny doesn’t get you found – especially for new bloggers. Keyword rich posts do. When you have a massive audience and an established blog you can write whatever you like but on your way up the ladder as you learn how to gain leads and enquiries using your local business blog sticking to the search engine rules is advisable.

As an example here are 7 of the latest posts from a different blog that I run

1. Because it’s never too late to start
2. Self confidence and feeling absolutely fabulous
3. Have fun and enjoy laughing
4. Self confidence in middle age
5. How to overcome shyness and build self confidence
6. The a-z or building self confidence
7. Self-confidence workshops in Chelsea

Can you guess what the blog focuses on? The first and third titles ares not keyword rich but the others are and the final one promotes a workshop being held in a local area.

The only way to connect you to the people searching for what you blog about is through the search engines. The search engines are the matchmakers who are about to bring two compatible people together.

-  Person 1 is doing the searching

-  Personal 2 has the blog that contains information person one is searching about

The search engines help make the connection between the two of you so you can come together.  If you are not using keywords on your blog – if you are not using the words that Person 1 is typing into the search engines you will never get to connect.  If I spent my time writing titles like

“This tip worked for me today”

“10 ways to make this work for you”

“How I lost the battle but won the war”

They are nice titles but they don’t mean anything to anyone – especially not the poor matchmaker trying to bring you two together. However if I say….

“This dog training tip showed me how to stop my dog chewing my shoes”

and there is a poor frustrated person using the search engines to find out how to stop his dog chewing his shoes then ding, ding, ding… we have a match!  When they visit your site and find loads of dog training tips that they can read and enjoy they are more likely to take the next step – which is usually to join your mailing list if you have one or visit your dog grooming business. Even if they were not looking for a dog grooming business at the time they have now been connected to one. As they were searching for something about dogs chances are they have one!

Another way to write a blog post so it is even more focused on your business and local area is to say something like:

“Our dog grooming business in Chelsea provides dog training tips to frustrated shoe owners”

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you want the search engines to bring you someone ‘well off and important’ then you must focus on developing a keywords list for your blog.

If you are not clear on what you are writing about your blog will find it difficult to get found and you will spend many frustrated months wondering why you are not being found. If keyword research isn’t something you took the time to do I recommend you sit back for a few days and give yourself a chance to consider who you are writing for, why and how you are going to help/entertain/educate or solve a problem for them. Then go out and discover what those people are typing in to the search engines when they are looking for information so that the matchmaker can bring back your perfect match rather than one you really didn’t want and who doesn’t want you!

When you start your local business blog on influencer.biz we help you get clear on how you will use your blog to promote your business online and that includes figuring out what keywords you will use. You also get loads of help and support along the way so you are never alone.

A local search is the process of your ideal customer entering their town, postcode, or address into the search engines to find a local service/product they need. As a local small/medium sized enterprise (SME) it is important you focus on developing easy ways to help your local business get found by potential customers who are searching.

There are many different ways to get your local business noticed so it is important you focus on two or three at a time and test how effective they are for you because whether you are a firm that specialises in:

“car hire in Luton”

“removal company Twickenham”

“Salsa classes in Hertfordshire”

If your potential customer is typing in the above phrase YOUR business needs to appear in the top results on the search engines.

Local search marketing surveys have already proven that more than half the people who carry out a local search go on to buy something from the business they find. That business needs to be YOU! There are loads of different ways you can attract local business and it all starts with an optimised blog that the search engines and your potential customers find.

By adding the phrase “Forest Gate, East London” you have now told the search engines that if anyone is looking for a “personal trainer in East London” that they should bring up your web properties. Of course there is a little more to do than just adding those words if you want to end up being the top of the search results because there will be other people running a personal training business in East London, however, it is a good start to help you take advantage of local search marketing.

Why use local search marketing?

Why would your local business want to engage in this kind of marketing? Well because more and more people are dumping the phone book and replacing it with the internet and you want to make sure they find your business. Local search marketing is the process of your business making a strategic effort to create and market material so your local customers find you. You may decide to start a business blog that provides ongoing helpful information, or you may create video and develop a channel on one of the popular video sharing sites that you add to your blog.

As a business owner you know how important bringing in fresh leads is to your business and engaging in local marketing will help you to make that happen – and it doesn’t take a lot to get started either. I recommend using a WordPress blog if you don’t have one and you might want to think about using videos too – just those two tools and the inclusion of your local area in the web copy you write will help you get found locally. We provide a WordPress Installation Service if you don’t have the time to think about installing it yourself.

If you have been thinking about new ways to engage with existing clients as well as find highly targeted new clients who are searching for what you offer right now take a good look at local search marketing and using the internet because it will make a big difference to your local business.

Our WordPress installation services and business blog platform support local business owners in the UK set up an online presence to attract local people searching. Become part of the influencer.biz family http://influencer.biz

In this section of the WordPress training for beginners series I am going to focus on planning. Any blogger with the mindset to succeed will want to plan out some of the important aspects before they start. Below are four essential things to consider before you think about installing your WordPress blog.

• Niche Research
• Delivery System
• Blog Outline & Content Creation
• Traffic Generation/Marketing

I focus on these three areas briefly below and you will find more indepth information in my WordPress training for beginners series.

Plan 1 : Keyword Research

It is essential you never step into the business arena without first taking a long hard look at what it is your market wants from you, who they are and why they will buy from you rather than anyone else. When it comes to research see it as fun – you are searching for gold and getting the right keywords on your blog will provide you with your very own goldmine. So become the detective and have fun looking into potential keywords for your local business. There is more on keyword research as part of the beginners training.

Plan 2 : Delivery System

We already know that your main delivery system will be your business blog. Through your blog you will keep existing customers informed while attracting new ones. Well there any hundreds of other ways to earn your living online and as you are already running a business you might want to consider things like

• Affiliate Marketing (promoting a product for another company – eg a personal trainer promoting exercise bikes)
• Information Products – writing your own eBooks or audio product
• Membership Sites – give your clients regular content they pay for
• Selling your services – consultancy

I have chosen these because you can use a blog to help you promote every single one of them and also because each one can be developed using the expertise you already have as a business owner. There are people who only make money with affiliate marketing, or creating information products so don’t try to do them all.

Once you have your research complete and you decide on what you will promote online (if you decide to do that – you may just want a blog so that people can get in touch with you) you are now ready to set up your blog but before you do it is a good idea to sit down and plan your blog outline.

Plan 3 : Blog Outline & Content Creation

Creating an blog outline will take some thinking on your part when you first set out to create one but once done it will provide you with ongoing content creation ideas at the beginning which is what you need. You will be amazed at the number of people who set up a blog and then run out of things to say a few months later and of course that is down to a lack of planning.

By setting out what you want to include on your blog you can look back at it time and time again as inspiration for what to write about and use it along with your content creation plan to ensure you never run out of things to say.

Your outline really doesn’t have to be a long drawn out process and will probably only take you a couple of hours maximum. This is a short but important part of your business.

Plan 4 : Traffic Generation/Marketing

Traffic generation or getting visitors to your blog is so important . The thing to remember is that having a blog is not just about driving traffic to it, there are blog owners who enjoy 10,000 visitors every day who are not making a huge income.
Remember this is a business and what is important here is what happens to those visitors when they hit your blog. As long as they believe your content is relevant the first thing they should want to do (after prompting from you) is to sign up for your newsletter or to join your list.

I can not stress how important having a list of subscribers is and I prefer to call them an audience. This group of people who will give you their email address in exchange for what you are offering free will want to continue hearing from you. I go into traffic generation in my WordPress training for beginners so I won’t say much more for now.

Be sure to sign up on the right to get updates from this blog so you don’t miss this series or any others I create.

If you have any comments/opinions/suggestions please leave them below.

There is nothing more frustrating than discovering that someone has taken your content and just blatantly stolen it, especially if you have spent hours researching your topic to ensure the content is valuable and accurate. Whether that content is written work like blog posts,  a book, a teaching/coaching program or other material like images, video, audio etc you have rights! In this article I focus on written content and in particular articles.

One of the more frustrating parts of content theft for me centres around article marketing and in particular my articles which are being sent out of thousands of article directories at a time.

This Friday I was checking out my reports inside an article marketing directory who provide a link to let you know where your article is being hosted on other sites. I randomly clicked on a few and found one blog that has used the article but not included my resource box. They had included my name (as I searched the site they hadn’t bothered adding an author name to any of the others I looked at) and as I went to find a way to contact them there wasn’t one.

Using Google Alerts

Because I have a Google alert set up on my name (very important to manage your reputation and read what people are saying about you/how people are using your name) I am alerted every time an article is posted on a site and sometimes I arrive to find they have removed my resource box.

This is very annoying because for someone reading the article they may assume I have a connection to the blog and am a writer for that blog – which I definitely do not want happening.

To counteract this I will leave a comment in the first instances. I write a comment and let them know as this is my article they need to include my resource box or they should remove my article from their site. That usually works and at the same time if they have a “contact us” form I will send a notice through there too.

The trouble is that many of the people doing this (I won’t even bother call them bloggers because they are not) will not bother to include any kind of contact info, some of them won’t allow comments on posts, so what else can you do? Well what you can do is focus on sending out information to the companies they use and what you want to send out is what Google calls a “Digital Millennium Copyright Act” (DMCA)  Copyright Infringement Notice.

All the details you need are included on the Google site and it outlines exactly what you need to do and the wording you need to use.  If the person using your content has a blogger blog or has Google adsense included on their blog (their adsense account will be closed down) then you can use this method to notify Google.

How else can you get them stopped?
Using the same template and wording (it’s a good idea to create one and use it over and over, just changing the appropriate details of the article) you can also send a notice to

• The domain company they use
• The hosting company they use
• The blogging platform they use (if they are using a free platform like blogger, WordPress or any of the others)

Sometimes an email will be enough and the company will contact the offending person and tell them to remove the work. Other times (especially with Google) they will ask you to fax in a written letter or write to them directly.

Weighing up the costs of this extra work

You really have to think about whether it is worth the time chasing people and there are some instances when I will and some where I might but probably won’t, here are what they are :

If anything has been taken directly from this blog I WILL because this is the only place I am including this content right now as I build my authority in this area so I do not want it appearing on other blogs/sites.

If it is an article I MAY NOT because I have sent it out to hundreds of other sites and to be honest I probably wouldn’t get much traffic from the scumbag rubbish that placed it on their site anyway.
If is is a book I have written I WILL because that is my hard work, it is my effort that went into writing it and I am not going to allow someone to just take that.

If it is an image I have bought (I spend A LOT of money on images from stockexpert) I probably won’t even bother – to be honest I don’t keep tabs on things like that – too time consuming. But if it was an image I had created from scrath as an artist of course then I definitely will make some noise about it.

Is there a service?

It would be great if there was a service that would do the chasing for you! For a small monthly fee if anything comes up they would make contact with the site and have it removed. It’s a shame none of the article marketing syndication sites offer this – or do they? Perhaps it is not worth their while in manpower hours it would take to chase this around.
I read a blog post last year some time about a blog owner who contacted other article writers on the same blog where hers had been posted and got together to close down the site. It took a lot of work because she had to search Google for the writer and the article to find contact details. I am not sure if I am that committed – not over an article anyway.

I do give people a break – at least once!

Sometimes innocent mistakes are made, especially by people new to this industry, they truly do believe it is okay to tamper with an article and change it by removing the resource box. There are also those who truly do believe that if content is on the internet it is free and they have a right to just take it and use it.
I always know when someone has just made an error and not realised it because they will get in touch and apologise, they will add the resource box or they will remove the article (I guess they decided as none of the other authors are complaining they will continue doing what they are doing and just remove me!)

This is not about fair rights

There is of course something called “fair rights” (I am in no way legally qualified to talk about this so please do your due diligence and check it out for yourself) which allows you to quote from a book you are right about. That’s fine and is not what I am talking about here. I am talking about a person taking your content and adding it to your site exactly as you have written it so that someone reading it will assume that they are the author.

I hope this article has been useful for providing you with information on what to do when someone steals your content. Remember you have writes as the original owner of that content and it is a good idea to let it be known online that you will fight for your rights!

Below are five things you should consider when you begin to take the first steps in local search marketing:

Don’t try and do it all alone
If all the work becomes too much for you because you are running your business as well as building your local business presence online, it is a good idea to look into outsourcing. When you outsource work it means you can get other people doing the work and they will be much faster than you can. If your budget will stretch to getting help then do that because the returns will come in faster. What will take you four weeks to complete will take someone who knows what they are doing a day, which means you get online faster.

Be Your Consistent Self 
There is no need to put on a persona or try to be anything you are not when you come online – just focus on being you because your potential customers will value that. Do your best to get into a regular habit in whatever you do and deliver on your promises. If your business promises one thing offline then promise the same thing online rather than have a completely different offer because that just causes confusion.

Know what you want and how you will get it
You need strategy and tactics in business to succeed and you also need them online too. Have a clear picture of what it is you want to achieve so when you start to implement the strategy you have the tactics that will help you succeed. Think about who can help you too – form alliances with people so you are not having to do all the work yourself.

Don’t burn the midnight oil
It is really tempting to spend all your time online after work to make this happen. You find yourself on social media, answering questions maybe even taken part in an online interview or radio show. Building your local business presence online is a full time job on its own so think about outsourcing it to a company who can help you.

Pay your dues 
It make take you 90-120 days before you receive your first enquiry if you have been consistent with your blogging and promotional efforts. When a new business owners speaks to me and tells me they are just setting up and not ready for a blog I let them know that it can take up to three months to generate regular activity so they should start sooner than later. This is not the case for everyone. Some new clients have new business in their first week or two. It really depends on what you offer and how many other local people are offering the same/similar service or product.

Be ready to put in the work that it will take to get noticed online and to stick with it until it really pays off and you find yourself in a position of being the person people always call when they need your product or service.

Many small business owners who are in a hurry to make the internet work for them usually end up with poor results because they have not taken the time to think through what it is they want to do and who it is they want to reach.

Writing Settings - In here I like to set my own Default Categories and Link Categories. You can easily run your blog or website without doing this, but I feel it saves me time and effort. I hate having “Uncategorized” show up in my list of categories. If I change my default category to something else, it means I will probably never have to see uncategorized again. Sometimes I forget to categorize my posts and when that happens I won’t have to worry about Uncategorized showing up all of a sudden.

Permalink Settings – You will find this under the SETTINGS option. The default means that the title url of your blog post looks like this

www.yourblog.com/?p=483 – the number is the number of your blog post but that doesn’t help you in the search engines. You want your blog to include the title of your blog post like www.yourblog.com/chocolate-cupcake-recipe – which tells the search engines what the blog post is about.

You can create your blog so it is just your blog domain name and the post by using the custom settings permalinks structure and only including t

This is important for the structure of your blogs and to help your blog posts rank in the search engines

Privacy – You definitely want to check out this setting. I have heard rumours of people installing a fresh WordPress and their privacy settings are set to block search engines. It is worth a second just to go into this setting really quickly and making sure that search engines can crawl your site. This is the only option to tweak in this particular settings menu so it is easy stuff. Most people will want to allow search engines because that is where most of your traffic will be coming from.

Discussion Settings – You can leave these settings alone if you want but there are a couple things I like to tweak. FIrst off I make sure the top option “Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article. ” is clicked. This means when you have a link to another blog you will send a trackback to that blog. If the person allows trackbacks that could count as a back link for you. Back links are good things!

I also like to change my gravatar picture. This is a small step but it can add a lot to the aesthetics of your site. A lot of people who comment on your site will not have a gravatar, so the default will show up. The “mystery man” might be good enough for most, but if you prefer you can add an image of yourself or your business logo.

Those are just settings on your WordPress blog that you might want to change and it really is the tip of the iceberg. Some things you will learn as you go along and become a more advanced blogger but the things I outlined above are things you want to look at as quickly as possible.

This is now part of my WordPress Training for Beginners <== click the link to see the other blog posts that are part of this series.

Feel free to leave any comments/suggestions or questions you may have.

The reason I did it that way was to test what I know and if I hadn’t passed I would have read up on the areas where my knowledge was weakest. Going through it lead generation conversion were the parts I had to spend time really thinking about – I really need to increase my knowledge in that area.

I know have a little badge I can display.

I would love to work up to an Msc in Digital Marketing because it helps to be able to wave a piece of paper around even if it really doesn’t mean a whole lot in terms of results and what can be achieved. Using and being active in digital marketing is a bigger qualification for me than the piece of paper but you know it all helps to strengthen one’s position in the market place

When you add your images make sure you include a description of your image as well because when the search engines visit your WordPress blog they will use the description and know what it relates to in terms of what your blog is focusing on.

So from now on make sure your file image is no longer a random set of numbers or letters but that you rename them using your keyword that you are trying to rank for in the search engines 

e.g. lutonpersonaltrainer-yourname

Watch the video and it will tell you more.

If you have any questions please leave them below.