Here’s the short list:
1. Pick a topic for your blog. Makes sense! You want visitors to know right away what they should expect when they start reading your blog. If one day it’s a personal commentary, then the next day it’s a how-to video blog it can get a little confusing. Keep it clear, and keep readers.

2. Encourage comments. This is how you show that you care. If you’re willing to listen to other’s opinion about your blog posts, then you’re open and honest. Keep it closed, and it seems like you just want a monologue – not a conversation. Don’t worry about negative comments – you can handle them. If you have issues with SPAM (like we all do) on your blog, use Akismet or math plugin to screen them.

3. Make it easy to subscribe. Feedburner - it’s a life saver.

4. About Page. For those that haven’t been following you all along, they’ll want to know about you, your interests, why you blog.

5. Be visual. Feel free to use graphs, charts, photos, videos and more – this visual simulation will help your visitors be more engaged.

6. Keep it short. People like to read online, but they like to read in short paragraphs, bullet points, and lists. Use them.

7. Subheadings for longer posts. Help break-up long posts into bite-sized, readable chunks.

8. Link. Use pingbacks (which allows your post to show-up on another blog), link to articles within your blog. Links help your readers to go deeper into the content and to explain a point without having to explain each time. Links are great for search engine optimization, too.

9. Headlines are descriptive. Let your readers know exactly why they should read your post up-front. If you’re vague then they’ll vaguely remember to read your blog. This is really important when people subscribe through RSS: some RSS readers will only show the title of the post, so if your title is descriptive, they can decide quickly whither or not to keep reading.

10. Archive by topic. It’s important to use Categories in your blog. It helps organize the blog for readers so that if they want to read more about a subject, they can easily click the coordinating category and read all your posts related to that topic. Date archives don’t help the reader.

To read the other 10, click HERE.

My favorite, though, is the last one:
20. Blog often. Technorati has a graph that shows that the most popular bloggers blog twice a day, the least popular posts a dozen times a month. If your readers like you, they want more from you – everyday! As a small business owner, I know it’s hard to blog on a regular basis – but knowing that if you blog often, your can get more readers – which translates into more business – perhaps you’ll change you’re mind! I know I did!

Our Panelists:

Kelly Thorne is the Founder & President of iBloom. iBloom is quickly becoming the go-to place for Christian life coaching for women. Kelly and her iBloom team have a mission to inspire and empower every woman in the world to cultivate an intimate relationship with God, discover her unique God-given design, and live intentionally – so she can have a significant impact with her life.

In her spare time, Kelly loves to spend quality time with family and friends, travel, read, and journal. She is passionate about living a joyful, thriving life. Kelly resides in Lexington, KY with her two dogs, Hope & Max.

Facebook – www.ibloom.us/facebook
Website – www.ibloom.us

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John Allen Mollenhauer (aka “John Allen” or “JAM”) is the co-author of the book The Curse of the Capable, (Fall 2009) by Harvard Psychology Instructor Arthur P Ciaramicoli, PhD. He is a leading Performance Lifestyle Trainer and Coach, with a specialty in personal energy management.
As founder of www.PerformanceLifestyle.com and the Lifestyle Coaching Center.com in Livingston, NJ he works primarily with achievers (business owners, professionals and entrepreneurs) who want to get free of the hidden challenges to a balanced, healthy high achieving life, restore and live the lifestyle for sustainable success.

“Most people have it backwards, you don’t achieve success to the improve your lifestyle, you improve your lifestyle to achieve and sustain success”

John Allen Mollenhauer “JAM”.

Follow me at
www.twitter.com/JohnAllenJAM
www.Facebook.com/John.Allen.Mollenhauer

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Terri Brooks is the President of A Virtual Business Solution, an Online Business Management company offering entrepreneur’s solutions for their Online Business Success!

Terri’s an Online Branding and Social Networking Trainer and Consultant with certifications in Internet Marketing and Social Media Marketing. She has more than 35 years of administrative and management experience. She trains and manages the steps to establish and explode you’re business using social media, as well as maximizing your online exposure through blogging, and electronic newsletters/ezines.

She is a member of eWomenNetwork – Knoxville Chapter Leadership Team and the developer and administrator of the Official eWomenNetwork Facebook Fan Page. She’s also a member of Big Fish Nation, and SelfGrowth.com’s – Social Media University Faculty.

FabulousFacebookFanPages.com
AVirtualBiz.com
http://twitter.com/avirtualbiz

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You can try out Genbook indefinitely for free (at least, that’s the policy right now), and there’s added capabilities (such as credit card capture, synchronizable appointment notifications, customer history, complete control over appointment times, text message notifications, and the ability to have clients book up to 1 year in advance) for less than $20 a month. A real great deal to give power to your clients, and give back time to you!

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What does this mean for coaches?

Well, for all business owners, we know that one (or three?) main factors to success is “Location, location, location” – and with foot traffic of 300 million users, Facebook is the place for a life or business coach to be. Go where the people go! Where else are you going to find such a diverse culture of people? Even if you connect to a very small percentage of those users, you still have a huge potential of doing business. However, with so many users, perhaps you may feel the need to ’shout!’ to be heard, but this is not true. If you start small, and are genuinely are interested in people – listen, interact, share – then your network will expand naturally. As Chris Brogan stated, “Don’t make your efforts on places like Twitter and Facebook solely about driving people to your home base, but instead, be helpful, participatory, and a good citizen of the social space you’re occupying. When you have some really interesting or helpful information, consider pointing people to your post for more information.”

When you first join Facebook, become friends with people you admire – check out your bookshelf or your RSS feeds for who that could be. People that follow those individuals might be like minded to you, and thus potential ‘friends’. As you grow your network, remember to interact with them as you would in ‘real life’ – such as a networking function. Ask questions, read their profile, get to know them. I’ve noticed that if I keep-up with my network a little everyday vs. a lot once a month, I’m much more likely to gain more out of it – both personally and professionally.

By the way, we’re having a Facebook Success Forum next Friday, September 25th. If you want to learn more about how successful coaches use Facebook, sign-up for the free 1 hour class.

1. Already successful and ready to retire: perhaps you are a coach that left a company and then started your coaching business, which related to what you were doing before. You already have the right connections and have more than enough business right from the get-go, and when the business runs out you plan to retire.
2. Coaching is a Hobby: perhaps you are a coach that isn’t looking to have a business, but just wants to be called ‘a coach’. I don’t recommend this as it hurts the coaching industry as a whole, and thus I would recommend not having an online presence. For more on coach credentials, code of ethics for coaches, or coach training, please visit the International Coach Federation website.
3. You don’t think you need one: perhaps you think it’s a waste of time, energy or money. If this is true, you probably will never read this post anyway because you don’t go on the web.

If, however, you’re new to coaching and you’re just launching your company – it might be best to spend your time connecting with individuals, companies and other potential clients than to spend several weeks trying to put a website together. I recommend, however, at least setting-up a little Wordpress.com site that at least explains what you do as a coach, some basic contact information and a blog. This will help you to build credibility to your prospects, and start building a presence on the web.

The evening promises to entertain, inspire and motivate coaches, business and community leaders, friends and family with a powerful message of how we can each live our life in a way that makes the most significant difference. We invite you to celebrate a decade of coaching excellence and service to the community with top business and life coaches in the local area. Featured guest is award winning comedienne, actress and speaker Kathy Buckley, who is billed as “America’s First Hearing Impaired Comedienne” www.kathybuckley.com and will entertain the audience with her personalized, humorous message and share how she overcame some of the most difficult obstacles one can imagine in life, meeting them with dignity, courage, and laughter. Past ICF-OC presidents will share their insights on the importance of community, recognize the contributions to the profession of coaching and acknowledge the vision and milestones the OC chapter has achieved over the past ten years. Special vibrational music will be played by Mark Romero, www.markromeromusic.com an amazing musician and sound healer, plus we have partnered with Second Harvest Food Bank www.feedoc.org to set up a food drive to provide hope and inspiration to those who are in need during these times.

Cost: $45
Where: Irvine Marriott Hotel, 18000 Von Karman Avenue, Irvine, CA
For more information, go to www.icforangecounty.org

Are you looking to YouTube? This podcast will walk you through some of the basics of how to get started, including how to choose keywords and add them to your discription, where to add your hyper-link, and how to gain more viewers.

Coaches and speakers around the world will find benefit in attending today’s class, June 26th from 10-11 am PST. You’ll learn:

- Position you as an expert
- People get to know you
- Build awareness and visibility
- Gain credibility
- Inexpensive marketing strategy
- Web Video Shows
- Earn revenue with web video
- The future of web videos

Our panelists are:

Arvee Robinson, is a Master Speaker Trainer, International Speaker, and Author. She teaches business owners, service professionals, and entrepreneurs how to use public speaking as a marketing strategy so they can attract more clients, generate unlimited leads and grow their businesses, effortlessly. She teaches a proven speaker system for delivering persuasive presentations, and easy formulas for creating killer elevator speeches and magnetic self-introductions. Arvee has helped hundreds of individuals to win clients and close more sales every time they speak. She offers private coaching, workshops, and weekly teleclasses. Her programs will make you money for the rest of your life.
www.instantprospeaker.com
www.arveerobinson.com
Twitter id: http://www.twitter.com/ArveeRobinson
Facebook id: http://www.facebook.com/ArveeRobinson

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Steve Rosenbaum is unabashedly enthusiastic about the media metamorphosis underway. Since he launched MTV UNfiltered with small format camera’s and an 800# (pre-internet) he’s been building companies and platforms that foster collaboration, contribution, and filtering. Today, as the CEO of Magnify.net, he provides Cloud Content Curation solutions to more than 55,000 web sites including New York Magazine, Zappos.tv, Etsy.tv, Weather.com, and more. In the future, all content lives in the cloud. The future just arrived.
www.Magnify.net
www.twitter.com/magnify

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