Blogs usually have something of a personal aspect to them. While blogs cover as broad an array of topics as do magazines and newspapers, they’re generally not as formal as those types of publications. For that reason, you can usually get away with journalistic no-no’s such as talking about yourself now and then, being blatantly in favor or opposed to a position, or openly being a fan or detractor of any given product.

There is, however, a line that you need to avoid crossing. On some blogs, the writing becomes far too much about the writer.

Blogs are resources that people turn to for specific information and, to some extent, sites that they visit for simple entertainment. This means, of course, that a blog has to define itself, as there’s really not a defined purpose for a blog like there is for a newspaper, whose purpose is to inform.  What your blog is about is entirely up to you. If you have expertise in a certain area, writing about that field is always a fine choice. If you have an interest in news or politics, you may enjoy some success as a blogger, provided that you’re talking about something outside of yourself most of the time.

Blogging is a great opportunity to build your personal brand, and WordPress is the most potent platform to use given that the search engines love fresh content.  But remember, this is not a place to talk about “you” per se; it IS about sharing your point of view on a specific topic.  Using WordPress to build your personal brand is about branding… not you. Make sense?

A good way to avoid becoming too personal is simply to count up the amount of times you use the pronoun “I” in your writing. If most of your material is about you, how you feel about subject X and how it impacts your life, your blog may not be all that interesting to read. It’s not that you’re not an interesting person; it’s that nobody really wants to hear someone talk about themselves. Good writers endeavor to write about their subjects, not about themselves.

You can be personal on a blog, however, and still keep your articles focused on their topics. The comments section of a blog is a good place to be less formal. Your readers may also email you personally, which is a great opportunity to interact with them. Remember that your blog should always deliver. If you have a blog about car repair, it should be about car repair as opposed to being about your feelings regarding car repair. Adding a bit of the personal to your blog posts can make the articles interesting, but adding too much can make them very tedious to read.

Focus on what the topic of your blog is and how to build your personal brand by making the posts, pages and articles you write about relate to the topic and the brand. What do you want to be known for with you personal blog? What is your area of expertise?  You can easily dominate your target niche if you know who your target market is and how to build your personal brand.

As always, please leave your comments below… love to hear them!

Keeping your blog focused on its stated topic is vital. It’s important to SEO because it ensures that your blog is actually about what it claims to be about. It’s also important for simple readability issues. Many of the blogs out there claim to be centered on one topic and, upon examination, prove to be scattershot, at best. Keeping your audience interested means letting them know what to expect and then delivering outstanding content that caters to those expectations. People do not like to have their time wasted, so don’t waste it when they visit.

On-topic blogs will naturally have good SEO writing in them. This is because they’re actually addressing the topic at hand, not attempting to trick a search engine into ranking them for a topic that they don’t cover. If you’re writing about your topic naturally, you’ll find that a lot of the keyword phrases that you’re fighting for probably fit into your articles effortlessly. This, it so happens, is exactly what search engines are looking for. When you create quality content, you’ve already won half the battle.

If you cannot think of topics to write about, remember that it’s better to revisit a topic you’ve already covered than to write something completely off-topic. This is not at all being redundant or a case of Internet reruns. Information changes all the time and, looking back through your past articles, you may well find that you could have expanded upon some points and clarified others. If this seems lazy to you, remember that even magazines and newspapers run the same stories over and over, with updated content and information to keep them fresh. If you can’t think of examples, holiday articles are great ones. Every year, there are new articles teaching you how to cook the same Christmas cookies, and people read them, even if they know how to make the cookies already.

You can be creative with your topics, but make sure that they do relate to the subject of your blog. It’s better to have several blogs that cover each different topic than to have one blog with an identity crisis. Generally, search engines will not look favorably upon blogs that aren’t particularly focused, as they don’t really provide useful resources to anyone at all. They tend to look like sloppily-constructed and poorly-maintained destinations, and search engines generally ignore such sites.

As always, I’d love to hear your feedback. So, please post your comments below and feel free to share this post with your friends.

~Kimberly Bohannon

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Uploading videos to so many places can be an undertaking. There are two great tools to upload this content. Tubemogul and Traffic Geyser. While Traffic Geyser offers far more features, if you are in need of a free video uploading tool for more than one month, check out Tubemogul. While not as full featured, it does offer the ability to bulk upload and measure statistics on your videos.

Learn how to use Tubemogul here:

These are questions I hear all the time. Once I found my unique voice, my passion for what I wanted to share… the task became fun and easy to do.

Blogs enable anyone to be heard. There have been several bloggers that have become very successful due to the quality and content of their blogs. Most of these bloggers also have a personality that shines through in their writing. Some of them are tech experts, some of them are political pundits and some of them are humor writers.

Whatever niche you’re trying to carve out, you’ll want to make sure the blog sounds original and that your personality is apparent in everything that you write, even if the blog isn’t about you.

Tech experts offer some of the best examples of good web writing. Their blogs come in all different levels. There are blogs for people who want to know how to perform user-level tasks and there are blogs that explain how to modify your operating system at the most fundamental levels. These writers usually garner an audience by speaking to their visitors in a unique voice. This may flow from their use of language, from their experience or from their choice in subject matter. You should cultivate your strengths when developing the tone of your blog.

Your voice should reflect who you really are. There are quite a few blogs on the Internet written by people who sound as if they simply want to be successful bloggers. The truly successful bloggers sound like writers who have something to say. Their subjects are focused, but they manage to interject their own personality into all their posts. As a guideline, humor is one of the hardest things to write. If you’re just starting out, it’s better to be a bit reserved in regard to making jokes. Some people find them distracting and that can take away from your content.

The truly successful bloggers tend to be very solid experts in their fields. From there, they’re able to establish their voice in terms of what they bring to that field. If you’re writing a blog about a particular field, including a lot of objective information will tend to give you an expert voice. Being very on-topic will also help with this. If you’re more casual in your blogging habits, you can spice up posts with pictures and video, which can make people take a greater interest in your posts. In any case, be sure to be yourself and you’ll find that your writing comes much more naturally.

Would love for you to share your comments below… so please let us hear your unique voice.

~Kimberly

Above is a video that our very own Courtney Engle created… “Have you wanted to backup your Facebook files, your Gmail contacts, or your Twitter posts? Check out Backupify to automatically connect to all these services.”

I found the below article while doing some research on the service and thought I’d share it, along with some other helpful links about Backupify and how to back up your social sites.

~Kimberly

Article

The battle for the cloud computing market, between Google and Microsoft, is heating up fast. Yesterday, Microsoft announced their new suite of Office Products and began to take pre-orders, for Office 2010. Microsoft will make their Office Web Apps available on June 15, 2010. That is also the date for stores to start selling the Office 2010 products. A battle of who will reign in the cloud SaaS market, for business and other applications continues to be waged. Microsoft has raised the stakes with the recent announcements, of their cloud based offerings.

Google has been out in front, trying to move customers to their Google Apps platform. Their premise of using Google’s servers and software, at a per user cost less than Microsoft’s, is a sound one. Google has been having success in both the educational and enterprise markets. One of the big obstacles for Google is the installed user base that Microsoft holds. Some estimate it at over 80 percent of the desktop market. The large number of Microsoft resellers and consultants give the people at Microsoft, another advantage.

Regardless of which cloud computing platform you choose, disaster comes without warning, so if you have lucked out so far, don’t delay any longer. The key to successful use of cloud computing is availability. Having a plan for when delays or outages occur is very important. You can backup email offline in Gmail, Hotmail and other web based email programs, for free. If you want to store your backups on cloud based server services there are some free ones. The storage amount given is not large, but good enough for important emails and other files. You can always buy more storage if needed.

One service that has garnered good reviews is Backupify. Backupify will back up your online accounts with services like Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and more. Right now you can get an account with 2GB of storage for free. Prices go up from there. You can visit their website at Backify.com for current pricing.

Another choice that has been popular for offline backup is Dropbox. Dropbox also offers 2GB of storage for free. Dropbox customers can sync files of any type and size, share files, access via a web connection on your computer or mobile device, and schedule automatic backups. Paid versions are also available.

The next few months, and remainder of this year, will be an interesting for Google and Microsoft. Consumers need to do their own research. Cost benefits and reliability are key. Regardless of the outcome, have a solid disaster recovery plan of your own. Did I say backup?

Greg Doig is owner of StratusClick Consulting. Visit him at StratusClick.com

Article Source: EzineArticles.com

You can also check out Backupify’s blog here: Backupify, Secure Your Online Life

Beyond concentrating on keywords and trying to get a specific density of those words on your page, writing in an SEO-friendly way helps you to stay focused on your topic. If you do it correctly, rather than writing a blog that reads like a bad attempt to use the same phrases over and over, you’ll end up with an entertaining, useful entry that will keep people interested and that the search engines will recognize as a legitimate resource that deserves indexing.

Your first step will not be writing. You’ll need to do some research to find out what keywords are best-suited to your blog. Remember that it’s better to be specific. As an example, if you were writing a blog about pet care, you’d be hard pressed to compete for that generic term. You’ll do better to pick a more specific term, such as “dog grooming”. In this example, you’d have to be even more specific to make the keyword useful, due to competition. To make it even more useful, you may choose something like “big dog grooming”. This significantly narrows down the competition.

You’ll need to include various permutations (different versions combinations) of that keyword phrase, as well. For example, you may include “dog groomer”, “dog groomers” and so forth. You can work these terms naturally into your content, which makes the article easier to read. It also doesn’t waste your reader’s time by serving them unintelligible, keyword-stuffed articles.

When you get good articles on your blog, remember to link them! Search engines look very favorably on sites that allow readers to actually surf the Internet, and linking to quality content—“quality” being the important word—will reflect well on your site.

You’ll need to submit your site for indexing to make sure that the search engines find it. You’ll also want to make sure that your keywords are included in the title of your site, the headings of the articles that apply and in your meta-tags.

Search engines will find you by your content, after a time, but submitting to the largest search engines is the best way to get ahead of the game. Most importantly, never try to “trick” a search engine by including keywords that don’t apply to your site; you’ll be removed from the indexes for good.

These are just a few SEO tips to make your blog search engine friendly. Remember, writing a SEO optimized blog post will help increase your chances of landing on the first page of the results when your potential prospect, or visitor, is searching for your specific keyword or keyword phrase.

Here are “10 Ways to Optimize Your Blog for Search” that I found while researching writing Search Engine Optimization friendly for your blog.

As always, please share your comments below. We’d love to hear from you.

~Kimberly