Reasons to Blog

There are tons of reasons to have a blog. Here are a few.

Blogging helps establish you as an expert in your field:

If you write extensively about topics in your field, people will come to regard you as an established expert; the more you write, the more that will be true. And in marketing, being an “expert” is gold. This, in my opinion, may be the single most important reason to maintain a blog.

Blogging gives users a reason to come back

If your website content never changes, visitors will read what they want to once and leave and probably never be back. But if you’re writing new content all the time, they have a reason to come back. And if your content is interesting, they may even become loyal readers (and fans).

Blogging gives you a reason to create new content

Once you’ve established a blogging habit, you’ll want to keep doing it (the definition of a habit, after all). If you don’t have a blog, adding new content is difficult and may involve redesigning your site. Blogs are simple; they manage themselves. All you have to do is to keep pouring content into them.

Blogging helps you think and improves your creativity

By disciplining yourself to blog frequently, you are making yourself create new ideas, think new thoughts, and explain things in new ways. Blogging will keep you out of mental ruts. New ideas will emerge, and you may even find yourself changing or redefining your business model.

Google loves activity

Did you know that Google gets bored easily, and if it finds nothing new when it checks your site, it probably will stop checking? But did you know that Google sees each new blog post as a separate page, and more pages and more content equals more attention from search engines? Want to get found? Write more stuff, and do it often!

Web Stats for 2012

In 2012:

The audience of internet users in the U.S. will grow to 239 million, about 75% of the total population.

Social Media:

Facebook will reach 143 million US users in 2012, up 8% over 2011.
About 2/3 of Internet users will use social networks in 2012.
More than 90% of social network users will be on Facebook.

Online Video:

Online video viewers will reach 169 million in 2012.
53% of the population and 71% of Internet users will be watching online video.
Mobile video viewers will reach 55 million.
Smartphone video viewers will reach 51 million.

Ecommerce:

88% of US Internet users ages 14+ will browse or research products online in 2012.
84% of Internet researchers will make at least one purchase via the web during 2012.
Online shoppers will reach 184 million, up 3% from 2011.
Online buyers will reach 155 million, up 4% from 2011.

Mobile Marketing:

Smartphone users will increase by 18% to 107 million.
94% of smartphone users will be accessing the Internet on their phones.
Mobile shoppers will reach 73 million.
Mobile buyers will reach 38 million.
Smartphone shoppers will reach 68 million.
Smartphone buyers will reach 36.4 million in 2012.
Tablet users will reach 55 million, a 63% increase over 2011.
iPad users will grow to 42 million.
76% of tablet users will be iPad users.
Adult eReader users will reach 45 million in 2012, up from 33.3 million in 2011.

Maybe you should get more involved?

Create your Google+ Page

Here’s a step by step video that will show you how:

Help! My Facebook wall is overrun by one person’s posts.

What can I do?

If you find that you have friends on Facebook who show up in your newsfeed often – maybe even more often than you’d like (especially if you have a smaller group of friends on FB), you can decide how many of their posts you’d like to see and whether you’d like your wall filled up with their posts everyday, or if you’d like to be more selective.

To make the changes and specify your settings, click on the friends name, next hover over the top right box marked subscribed. Then choose your setting: all updates, most updates, only important, and then the types of posts you would like to see. This should help to clean up your wall, and allow you to see your grandkids more often.

You can use unsubscribe as a last resort. That way you are still friends and have all those communication and connection perks, but you can choose when to visit their wall to see what’s new.

I post often – and know that people enjoy what I share. Though if I have 2000 friends, and you have 50 – yes, I’ll occupy much of your wall. So make the choices and enjoy setting your own preferences – social media is a verb, it can grow and change with you!

Startup – Kevin Ready

A friend of mine wrote a book. There was enough packed into chapter 1 to make this a must read book for every business owner and entrepreneur. He’s got a great way of creating visual examples to illustrate concepts. Super congrats to Kevin Ready, I think he really delivers! If you are a friend of mine, you need to visit Amazon and snag a copy. You’ll love it!

Via Amazon.com

“Startup: An Insider’s Guide to Launching and Running a Business is for people who are excellent at something—product or web development, writing code, marketing or selling anything—but who are now toiling for others. Yet they have long had a dream: to take that special skill set and use it, on their own terms, in a startup business.

This pattern is romanticized by the media in the form of the “tech entrepreneur”—the guy brainstorming with buddies in a garage who ends up selling his startup for millions. But what is the reality behind stories like that one? For that matter, what mental processes, frames of reference, hard knocks, and lessons learned make up the “back story” behind any startup success? This book not only reveals the actual experience of entrepreneurship, but it provides readers with a set of universal entrepreneurial skills and tools they can use to build a business.

Author Kevin Ready has made this journey, and more than once. He earned his MBA—Master of Bruise Acquisition—through numerous encounters with “situations,” problems, black holes, bad employees, sea monsters, not enough money, and other karate chops to the organizational body. Startup illustrates in detail the lessons he learned the hard way—so you don’t have to.

Backed up by stories of both his successes and failures, Ready helps readers learn shortcuts to help them do what eight out of 10 entrepreneurs can’t: Build and sustain a successful start-up.

Illustrates the entrepreneurial journey from start to finish
Helps readers decide—or not—to start a business
Provides dozens of lessons learned and other takeaways budding entrepreneurs can put to use today

What you’ll learn

What entrepreneurship is, and what it is not.
How to get into the skin of an entrepreneur and see the world from that perspective—before you quit your job and put everything on the line.
Key lessons that have left burn marks and abrasions on the (now very thick) skins of successful entrepreneurs.
Why building your product is only half the battle.
What the most important goals and imperatives are for any business, ensuring that you can start working on them from day one instead of stumbling into them years later and losing time, money, and opportunity in the process.
What you must know about finding, recruiting, and growing a team of dedicated employees that will share your vision and eventually take ownership of your ideas and carry them forward for you.
The advanced mind-over-business strategies for staying on top of (and inside of) the complex currents that make up your business and the market it flows within. These tools are a prime distinguishing factor for superstar entrepreneurs.

Who this book is for

This book is for anyone wishing to start a business, but especially IT workers toiling in the trenches who have dreamed of a starting a business. What’s involved? What challenges can I expect? How do I survive common entrepreneurial mishaps? Once I get the business up and running, how do I keep the wheels turning profitably? How do I attract customers? How do I manage people? This book answers those questions and many more.

Chapter 1: Setting the Stage for Starting a Business

Chapter 2: Operations and Decisions: Core Lessons in Execution

Chapter 3: Marketing Your Products and Services

Chapter 4: Building a Team: You Can’t Do It Alone

Chapter 5: Strategic Thinking: Advanced Lessons for Founders”

What does a like really mean on Facebook?

Businesses have been using pages – both effectively and some very in-effectively since Facebook made them possible. There are some benefits to having a FB page for business – stats on your audience, ability to interact inside a website where people already spend their time, photo sharing, and more. It only works if you are actively using your page – and this does take time.

Stay tuned to the InSights blog for even more tips on how to engage your audience on Facebook. In the meantime, enjoy this article on what Facebook Page Likes actually mean.