A Corporate or Business Blog is like the backbone for your brand’s virtual activities. It keeps you grounded, helps you connect with your clients who become your reader and helps you to reach out to possible, prospective clients.

So, this isn’t a task you can neglect. It’s something that’s important and hence, here are 8 tips to improve your business blogs.

1. Make a Business Plan For Your Blog

Why not! When we have business models and plans for marketing, PR, External
relations; then why not have one for your blog?

So, sit down and make a plan for your blog.

2. Set Goals For Your Business Blog

Like your company has goals for business, you must have a goal for your blog.

Is the purpose of your blog customer care? Is it to pass on messages? Is to provide live updates? Having a Goal is important.

3. Set Up A Team

Once you have your plans in place, it’s important to have a team in place. Either you can recruit specifically for the same (yes, it’s worth the investment) or you could pick up a group of employees and ask them to manage the blog.

4. Regular Analysis

Now that the team is all set, you should meet them regularly and see that the work is rolling. What is the progress? What are the site stats? Is the traffic right and what are people saying? It’s important to keep a tap on happening around your blog and ensure that you’re working in the right direction.

5. Constant Evaluation And Improvement

The analysis should be followed with evaluation that is in depth and structured. Every evaluation should be about improving the content and trying to provide better content to your readers. Even corporate blogs have regular readers who are following your work and progress. It’s important to keep that in mind and work towards giving the best.

6. Integrate Your Blog With Your Social Profiles

This simply means stay connected with your entire virtual presence. Connect your blog to your social networking profiles and vice ? versa. This way it helps people reach you and helps them to find the information they are seeking easily. Moreover, it makes you a more ‘reliable’ entity.

7. Prepare In Advance

Now if your blog is going to be about updates, it’s evident that all the information won’t be present in advance. But it’s always good to have buffer posts. Keep your blog team in the loop. You should have specific days or times to publish your blogs so that your audience has a regular intake of content.

8. Editorial Guidelines

Have editorial guidelines. This is very very important. What content you post and how you post it is very important and creates a lasting impression. It also affects your relationship with the reader and hence, setting your guidelines is a vital element.

Author Bio: Divya is a website content writer and SEO analyst in an website marketing firm. She has a flair for social media marketing and loves working with e-commerce and virtual businesses.

Waaay back when I was in high school, math wasn’t one of my best subjects.  In fact, it wasn’t until after High School before many math concepts actually started to ‘click’ for me.

In my High School days, we didn’t have the vast resources of the internet to tap into.  The closest thing we had to Google was the Oracle of Delphi, which involved a long voyage over the ocean and a lot of buttering up to the pantheons to get a good ranking with the oracle.

Since then, Pythia has relocated to the U.S. and adopted the pen name ‘Google’ which has a fairly decent online presence.

Anyway, my sister to the rescue.  My sister Misty is a Math teacher (and a very good one I might add!).  She has decided to share her knowledge beyond the borders of the classroom, and help those struggling with math by offering great math tips, not only for struggling High School students, but for anyone.

I think her writing style is great, and Misty is the type of math teacher that I wish I could have had back in the day.  I probably wouldn’t have struggled nearly so much.

I strongly recommend checking out her blog, even if you don’t need help improving your math grades, you’ll find this a fun site to check out.

Congrats Misty, for having the guts to get an online presence and helping those in need!  You’re off to a great start!  You can check out Misty’s blog at http://mathhelpforyou.wordpress.com/

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If you’re running or starting a business online, do you find yourself winging it most of the time, drifting from one opportunity to another, putting in a lot of effort with no real return?

More often than not, this is due to a lack of vision as to where we want to go. Just as a vast majority of the population are completely out of touch with their core desires (another subject in itself), many online marketers are equally out of touch with their core purpose.

Why do you want to have an online business?

If you answered something like “because I want to be filthy rich”, or “to make lots of money”, or even “so I can pay my bills”, you probably need to check your core purpose to having an online business.

Let’s say that your answer was to be filthy rich. Now let’s drill down further. Why do you want to be rich? To get revenge on your former lover who said you’d always be a loser? Perhaps you hate your J.O.B., and you want out of the dead-end grind. Let’s go with that one.

So why do you want out of your J.O.B.? Most likely it’s because you don’t want someone else dictating your schedule, and having to depend on someone else for an income. Someone who may not always appreciate you, and who could ruin your life with just two words… “you’re fired”.

In this case, you want to do what you want, when you want, where the income potential is only limited by your imagination and efforts. You want the freedom to write your own ticket. Not having to worry about paying the bills. The freedom to take off to Maui on the spur of the moment, just for the fun of it. Ahhh, FREEDOM. Now we’re on to something.

In this case, it turns out that your core purpose is not to be filthy rich in itself. It’s FREEDOM that you’re ultimately after. In reality, the way that you are generating your income is the very tool by which you can accomplish your ultimate goal… FREEDOM.

Taking a few minutes to drill down your core purpose for being in business can save you a ton of effort in the future. If you’re looking for freedom, then your business needs to be centered around freedom principles.

This would include creating procedures for automating as many aspects of your business as possible. What you can’t automate, you can outsource. Perhaps there are certain aspects that you want to do yourself.

Personally, I enjoy programming, so I create my own software products myself. I could outsource it in a fraction of the time, but this is something that I enjoy, and prefer to play the major role in design and creation.

You may want to completely detach yourself from your business. In this case, you need automation and / or outsourcing procedures in place so that you can step away from your business, and it will run just fine without you. Suppose you were struck by lightning tomorrow? What would happen to your business? Would your family be able to carry on with the income it produces, or would it simply die along with you?

Those are serious things to consider right at the outset. If you get yourself trapped into working your butt off with 18 hour days and little proportional income, where is your freedom? You might just as well be slavin’ for the man; at least you’d be slavin’ less hours.

Take a few moments to drill down your core purpose for business using the technique above, and see where it takes you. Now form your vision based on that, and start building your business, or change course on your existing one, around your core purpose, and someday you’ll thank me for that.

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I thought I would share some of the pics that we snapped while here in Beijing.

China is quite beautiful this time of year which forms the perfect backdrop for a perfect birthday. Kevin has just turned 3. Hard to believe. It just seems like yesterday when I saw him open his eyes for the first time. Happy Birthday Kevin!

Tingting’s relatives came by to help celebrate Kevin’s big number 3. Tingting’s younger aunt brought us some traditional hats with scarves from China’s Xinjiang provence which she picked up while visiting. Kevin, Tingting, and I are posing with them in a couple of the pics.

Some of the other pics are from different days. One set is from an amusement park that we took Kevin to, and others from the Beijing Olympic park area where the 2008 Summer Olympics were held.

We will all be back in the U.S. next week. Visiting China never gets old. It seems like that there’s something new to see everytime, making the 13 hour flight well worth it.

Traveling is a great way to build memories that you can carry with you into your old age. Having an automated internet business system makes it that much easier to create those experiences which enhance what’s really important in life. Have you started yours yet? If not, what’s keeping you? As my uncle Joe Nike always says… “just do it”.

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I thought this was pretty cool.

This is Miku Hatsune, one of the most popular Vocaloid characters out of Japan.

Hatsune Miku translates as ‘first sound from the future’, which is appropriate since she is the first of Crypton’s “Character Vocal Series”.  Miko’s voice is based on Yamaha’s Vocaloid technology.

Back around 2007, Crypton decided to use a different marketing strategy from ZeroG’s. Instead of focusing on high end studios, they changed their focus to the public in general, especially targeting teenagers.

In addition to an extremely appealing voice, they also needed to develop an image. Enter manga artist KEI. Kei had come up with Miko, and gave her the physical characteristics, but left it up to the public to collectively give her personality.

You could say that the collective energies of contributors and fans from all over the world have given Miko a soul of her own, somehow traversing the boundaries between the perpetual near future, and the present. The physical and the virtual.

Miko’s immense popularity has resulted in some pretty astounding sales figures as well. Here is an excerpt from Wikipedia:

The initial sales of Hatsune Miku were so high that Crypton could not keep up with the demand. In the first 12 days of sale, nearly 3,000 sales reservations were made. This was around one sale in 250 in the music software industry, quoted as “an impossible number” by Wataru Sasaki—the person in charge of the planning and production company ‘surprise’.  Amazon.co.jp stated on September 12, 2007 that they had sales of Hatsune Miku totaling 57,500,001 yen, making her the number one selling software of that time.

The decision to combine Vocaloids with a manga character was an instant magic formula that brought Vocaloids from an obscure niche into a new genre of music. This strategy has opened the floodgates of collaborative content creation which has sparked a whole new dimension in artistic creativity.

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Ever notice how the standard push button income is $10,000 per month? Surf out to any sales letter on any “make money online” website, and chances are that for a nominal fee you can make 10k per month with little or no effort.

Just buy their magic pill and you’re on easy street. Not bad for $39 bucks eh? So how come they never work? Why is it that so many internet business hopefuls end up with nothing but a hard drive full of broken digital pipe dreams?

Perhaps it’s because so many people go into this thinking that the internet is this magical universe where endless streams of wealth will pour into their lap if only they can just learn the trick.

That elusive trick that the “gurus” keep to themselves while teasing you with their systems packaged for public consumption, but somehow falling short of the real secrets which are only shared within their elite inner circle. The IM illuminati.

Look Familiar?

Is there such a secret society? Or is it merely a myth perpetuated by the over active imaginations of others? One thing I can say about marketing on the internet is that you really don’t need to be looking for that elusive “trick” to be successful.

The internet is a medium in which you can market, just like either a physical storefront, or a flea market booth can also be a medium. There’s obviously many advantages to marketing online, but if you realize that the internet is just another tool that you can use to create an income, your perspective will be much clearer on the bigger picture.

So is 10k a month unrealistic for online marketing? Not at all. Is it unrealistic to expect 10k a month right away with little to no effort? Yes.

Many people give up after a short go around in internet business because they bought into the hype that making money online is easy as pie and completely effortless. They don’t realize that there is a learning curve involved just like anything else. It takes practice to get good at it, and it takes time to build a viable long term business with a loyal following of repeat customers.

If you’re just getting started in Internet business, and if God forbid, you are also in a desperate financial situation, don’t be a tool. Do what you have to in order to get through the crunch, and then come back when you can build a real business without the pressure of having to pay the rent in two days or face eviction.

Building a business for the long term takes dedication along with that four letter ‘w’ word. It’s not always that easy, but it’s also not that difficult. I’m willing to bet that you’ll find this journey to be one the most enjoyable and rewarding endeavors that you may ever experience during these hundred or so trips around the sun.