Kathy Hendershot-Hurd

Business Details: The Devil known as Domain Names

November 23, 2010 by Kathy Hendershot-Hurd

William Feather – an American author – once cautioned,

Beware of the person who can’t be bothered by details.

As a business owner, the hardest part of owning and running your own business is paying attention to all the tens of thousands “loose threads” which make up your business.

For the past few years, I’ve been helping business owners set up self hosted WordPress blogs to power their online marketing message. We walk through all the hundreds of tiny details which have to be addressed in order to create a powerful online communication tool for their business.

Why would you want to invest the time and money in launching YOUR OWN business blog instead of a starting with a FREE business blog?

Launching a new business blog is a LOT like launching the space shuttle. When NASA launches the space shuttle -the 1,200,000 lbs of thrust generated by the main engines isn’t enough to break Earth’s gravitational pull. NASA needs additional rockets to generate the additional 6,000,000 lbs of thrust. However, once the shuttle has broken free of the Earth’s gravitational pull – those additional rockets are jettisoned having performed their job.

When you launch your business blog – there’s a lot of work that is done “up front”. Just like launching the space shuttle – it takes a lot more effort to start a business blog than it does to maintain one. (By the way, this up front work has to start anew when you decide to “switch” to your free blog to your own self hosted business blog.)

The good news is that once that initial work is done (pick ujp a copy of the 8 Week Power Blog Launch to learn how to shorten that launch period to 8 weeks or less.) – your business blog can easily “glide” with minimal effort on your part.

A few of my clients have actually “ignored” their business blogs for periods of 12-15 months at a time. In several cases, this period of inattention has actually been a good thing. One client was pleased to discover that after a prolonged absence from business blogging -that her blog was enjoying quite a bit of success with long tail searches for her services. Her blog was getting 100 unique visitors a day via search and when she returned she discovered that more than a dozen of those visitors had left comments requesting more information about her services.

Ok- it wasn’t “good news” from the visitor’s point of view. Visitors left comments – asked for information – and got deafening silence. However, the silver lining was when this business blog owner returned to see those comments, it ignited a renewed passion to begin really using her business blog as a marketing tool for her business.

Fortunately she had subscribed to the Cyber Angel hosting services which automatically updates WordPress and essential plugins – so when she did turn her attention back to her business blog she didn’t return to a blog which had been ruthlessly hacked or hijacked by someone who wanted to capitalize upon her tightly targeted niche position.

This is a happy tale of how one business owner “lost track” of one of the many details of her business and it ended well. Because she had carefully crafted her business blog’s foundation – even a 13 month absence didn’t “destroy” her business blog. As a matter of fact, she returned to a blog stronger than it was when she last logged in – a blog with an additional 13 months of “credibility” with the search engines.

Then there’s the other side the coin – when an inattention to detail has disastrous results. It begins with an innocent email that reads, “Help! My business blog is down and I don’t know why.” What follows is an “on your way to the top you might fall down” types of experience.

I’ve received various forms of this email over the past few weeks and in every case, the reason the blog is “down” is because the domain name registration expired. When a domain name registration expires – everything associated with the domain name comes to a screeching halt.

When you register a domain name for your business blog – you’re only “renting” the name – you do not “own” it. Because you’re renting it – you have to “renew” it on a yearly basis.

You might also be surprised how many business owners are not the registered owners of the domain name for their business. Instead, they’ve chosen to register their domain name for “free” as part of their hosting set up. When you choose that option, the hosting company – NOT YOU – is listed as the administrative contact for the domain name. That means the hosting company is in control of www.yourcompanyname.com. (Yes- domain names are considered “real” property and if your hosting company refuses to transfer www.yourcompanyname.com to your business, you CAN choose to pursue legal remedies. However, have you priced a lawyer’s services lately? That “free” domain name is going to get really expensive once lawyers are involved. I J S)

This year alone I’ve had several business owners contact me – anxious to begin the adventure of business blogging – only to discover that their web developer or their hosting company “controls” (a.k.a. “owns”) the domain name that they thought “belonged” to their business.

Why is “registration” of a domain name critical?

Think of your domain name as the “address marker” for your business blog. The real “address” is a series of numbers known as an IP address . Your domain name is simply the “human friendly” way of finding where websites and blogs “live” on the web.

In addition to serving as an address market – domain name information is used extensively by the search engines. Keywords contained within a particular domain name can bring hundreds of visitors a day via search to a blog. (Just ask my client who “checked out” for 13 months to return to a blog full of comments from potential clients awaiting moderation.) However, the search engine look at a lot more than just the phrases and word contained within the domain name – they also look at the HISTORY of a domain name.

It’s commonly accepted “web wisdom” that older content – and older domain names – get more search engine “luv” than new content and newly registered domain names.

Domain names and great original web content get better with age.

Which is why – it’s so heartbreaking for me to get an email from a client who has invested the time and effort building a brand new blog under a brand new domain name into a blossoming business blog which is climbing the SERP charts only to have the rug pulled out from beneath their feet by an expired domain name. It’s even more frustrating because it is so easily avoided.

As I write this blog post, I am reminded of an earlier email from a client who is currently experiencing this heartbreak. She had hired a new virtual assistant and needed her blog log in information so her VA could handle the many web based details which were overwhelming her. Obviously this “detail” of renewing her domain name had slipped by unnoticed by this cut rate VA. (Read “Avoid Hiring the VA from Hell” for more tales of VA horror.)

Meanwhile, her product is almost ready for beta testing – and the firmly established web position she had staked out is now gone.

My client’s VA dropped the ball and now she’s got to choose whether she will invest more time and money into launching this business.

Personally – I hope she fires her virtual assistant and continues her journey to launching a product which targets an emerging online trend. I hope this doesn’t derail her vision or cool her passion for creating her product. I hope the fact that her domain name was snapped up so quickly serves as evidence of the potential that lies ahead.

But in the end – it’s up to her whether she decides to get up or stay down. What would you do?

Blogging Off Topic

November 16, 2010 by Kathy Hendershot-Hurd

One of the most challenging aspects of business blogging is deciding upon a topic. Not only do I hear the many “reasons” (a.k.a. excuses) for not choosing a topic and sticking with it, but I’ve uttered a few of them to myself along the way.

Admittedly – it’s hard to stick to a tightly targeted topic. It requires effort and creativity to compose blog posts that somehow – someway – take a cursory pass at the topic of your blog. Once again – I’d like to offer here a bit of advice for anyone who would rather learn from my experience than their own.

Blogging off topic

Why are you blogging? It’s the most important question to ask as you launch your business blog. If you’re enveloped in a fog created by the various “gurus” who tout business blogging as the way to get rich quick for your business – you’ll quickly discover that business blogging is not a get rich quick sport.

Business blogging is a GREAT way to build an impressive array of articles which showcase the value of your products and services. Business blogging makes publishing these informative articles to the web quick and easy. Through these articles – you can allow prospective customers/clients/patients to “see” what’s in store after they do business with you.

One important lesson I’ve learned over the past few years when it comes to business blogging is this:

Blog posts should be timeless.

However, when you are blogging – it’s often easier to write about what’s happening at the moment than to lay out a blogging “plan” for your upcoming posts. Don’t get me wrong – sometimes “the moment” is the fodder for the best blog posts.

SOMETIMES

Other times – “the moment” takes your blog horrifically off track and off topic.

A few years ago – I wrote such a “blogging off topic in the moment” post. At the time, I was feeling abused by a local business and very angry. I also had shiny new powerful Weapon of Mass Destruction – my blog. I vented my frustration under the title “When a pest control company becomes your biggest pest.”

That blog post did everything I wanted it to do at that moment in time. My account with the company was quickly adjusted and I was pleased. Not only did I achieve satisfaction – but once again I saw the benefits of maintaining a business blog.

That was then – this is now.

Today that blog post seems to have become an internet lightning rod for Floridians frustrated by their pest control company. (Pest control services are a necessity when you live in the Sunshine State.) So what’s not to love about a blog post that gets so popular that it becomes the target of an internal online reputation repair campaign?

Well – it’s the fact that the blog post is completely and totally off topic for my blog.

When visitors arrive at my blog via search – they see that blog post as their “opening page”. Keep in mind, many of those visitors are here for information about pest control companies in Florida. There isn’t much information here beyond that single post – so these visitors bounce. They aren’t here for information about social media marketing or business blogging – they’re here because they’re upset with their pest control company.

Business blogging is definitely a horse of a different color than “traditional” blogging.

As a business blogger – you need to create TIMELESS blog posts that are on target – because the older those blog posts get – the more likely they are to show up in a search.

“A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.” ~Mark Twain

I blogged in the moment – and I inadvertently picked a cat up by the tail.

A word to the wise – if you’re blogging for your business – focus upon keeping your blog posts on topic and timeless.

First Impressions Mean Everything

November 9, 2010 by Kathy Hendershot-Hurd

It turns out the first impression your business makes on consumers may be the only impression you ever get a chance to make.

Studies have shown that first impressions are actually more powerful than previously thought. It’s possible our brains are actually wired so that the first impression made upon us by others actually become self-fulfilling prophecies.

One such study was done by psychologist Nalini Ambady. During her time at Havard, she performed an experiment to examine the effect of first impressions on perception. In this study, she divided students enrolled in a college class into two groups. She showed each group video clip of the professor “in action”. One group saw clips which depicted the professor as cold and uncaring. The other group saw clips which portrayed the professor as warm and caring. Each student was asked to write an evaluation of the professor after viewing the clip. Of course, their first impressions of the professor were carefully crafted – and students who were shown one set of clips had a distinctly different first impression that the group shown the second set of clips. The students in both groups then took the class with the professor in question.

I wanted to believe that once the students EXPERIENCED the professor’s teaching firsthand that they would then be able to form an “accurate” opinion. I wanted to believe that Instead of the carefully crafted first hand impression they had formed based on watching a few brief video clips, the students would end the class seeing the professor for who and what he really was.

However, that’s not what happened in the study. Instead of the students revising their original first impressions based on first hand experience, they instead fiercely clung to their carefully orchestrated first impression.

At the end of the semester – the students who saw the videos depicting the professors as warm and caring still described him as warm and caring. Those who began the semester thinking the professor was cold and uncaring ended by describing the professor as cold and uncaring.

This study – and several others that followed – seem to illustrate this disturbing fact:

The first impressions actually become self-fulfilling prophecies.

This study shows why it’s essential that your business make a good first impressions on consumers. That’s one of the reasons business blogging is becoming such a powerful force for businesses big and small.

When you begin blogging for your business – it gives your business an opportunity to “speak” in a warm and caring manner. You can influence consumers by “speaking” in a warm, caring voice via your blog. You can write to address their problems and provide answers. You can carefully craft the first impression your business makes on consumers.

So often, small businesses craft their web site trying to appear “cold and uncaring”…. a.k.a. “professional”. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with a static web presence that has a professional appearance – but the real question is –

Is that what consumers want when they visit your web site?

Your professional static web site may offer basic information consumers need – but chances are they need more. They need a carefully crafted first impression maker which casts your business as the problem solver they need.

That’s the type of first impression your business blog can make.

Your business blog can do more than your static web site because it can tell daily, weekly or monthly stories of how others have used your products/services to conquer evil and save the world.

Maybe your stories won’t be Star Wars epic and grand – but you get the picture.

Your business blog can share real life customer testimonials – via the written word, via audio or even via video. As you create those stories and share those testimonials – you’ll find that your business blog begins to almost magically begin attracting visitors who were searching for “keywords” contained within those stories.

That’s a “warm and caring” first impression every business owner should be striving to make.

When is it time to stop business blogging?

November 2, 2010 by Kathy Hendershot-Hurd

Launching a business blog is an exciting time. The opportunities that open up as a result of blogging for your business are positively staggering. There’s no way to predict specifically how blogging will impact your business – but if you give blogging for your business a six month commitment – you will no doubt witness some form of benefit that more than justifies the time and expense.

Perhaps you’re like a lot of business owners and one of the reasons you haven’t started blogging for your business is that you’re afraid it’s a never ending commitment. If the prospect of making an open ended commitment to business blogging makes you nervous, take heart.

Every business owner who maintains a business blog will have to answer the question, “Is it time to stop blogging?”

Jim Kukral is a blogging superstar. He’s an author – a speaker and a consultant who began blogging way back in 2001. Blogging has helped to establish Kukral as a sought after speaker, author and business thought leader. Last week – he announced that he has quit blogging and his announcement has created quite a stir. Many have offered their take on Kukral’s decision to quit blogging. Jonathan Fields writes in his post “Should YOU stop blogging”

[T]he bigger message we should all take from his announcement is not that blogging is dead, but that:

We need to examine why we’re doing what we’re doing on a regular basis, then

Respond and evolve to accommodate change, both external market-imposed change, and internal shifts in where we want to take our businesses and lives.

We’re all hostages to the constraints that time places upon us. We all have a mere 168 hours available each and every week. Work – play – sleep – all have to fit within the confines of 24/7. It’s no secret that launching and maintaining a business blog takes time and we all have to budget our time effectively.

We make dozens of” time budgeting” decisions daily – many of them without much conscious thought.

I like to equate blogging with exercise because both require a regular commitment and the benefits tend to accumulate over time. When we say that we’re “too busy” to exercise – what we’re really doing is valuing the benefits of other activities over the benefits of exercising.

There’s one key difference.

The benefits of business blogging don’t stop when you quit blogging.

Stop exercising for three months and your body will definitely tell the tale. On the other hand, assuming you’ve created a solid business blog foundation – you can take 3 months off from business blogging and come back to find a business blog that is stronger – not weaker – as a result.

The time you devote to business blogging today will continue to benefit your business long after you’ve stopped blogging.

Lisa Barone over at Outspoken Media gets it. In her blog post, she is encouraging business owners to ask the right questions about using social media. She writes:

Ask yourself:

What are your business reasons for doing X?

What actions are important to help you see a benefit from X?

What are the rules for the organization when participating in X?

Is X the best thing for your business, or could you see a better reward if you switched your focus to something else?

I love the way Lisa phrased these questions – because they’re questions that every business owner needs to ask about EVERY business activity – not just business blogging.

One of my clients recently let her membership to the local Chamber of Commerce expire. She enjoyed the networking activities but her business is “bigger” than the small Tennessee town in which she resides. As her practice has grown – she has had to evaluate whether the time she spends socializing at local Chamber events is the most profitable use of her time. This year, her answer to whether to remain active is”No”. For her, that 2 hours a month is better spent finishing her book and blogging than socializing.

For Jim Kukral – when he asked those questions – his evaluation of the time he was spending blogging lead him to quit investing time in creating new blog posts.

But notice – he is NOT taking DOWN his business blog.

That’s not what Jim means when he says he is “quitting blogging”. There’s a big difference between taking DOWN your blog and choosing to stop actively creating new content for your business blog.

Over the past nine years, Jim has created hundreds – perhaps thousands of blog posts. Even though Jim won’t be creating new blog posts, the posts he has created in the past will continue to serve him well. When visitors arrive at Kukral’s now static blog – they will still be able to click on the links in the sidebar – they’ll still be greeted with a pop-up window to ask them to sign up for Jim’s newsletter – they can still become a “doer” and part of his private inner circle.

In other words, Jim’s blog will continue to do what his blog has been doing for the past nine years – building trust, establishing his expertise, collecting leads and selling his book. The point is – now his blog has reached a point where he doesn’t HAVE to keep adding posts. He can simply let his blog continue to do what he created it to do.

One of the biggest”fears” I hear expressed about business blogging is that business owners confuse business blogging with “blogging”. Business blogging does not require that you post three times a day 7 days a week. The only reason for blogging on that type of schedule is if your primary competition is the 24/7 cable news networks.

For most business bloggers – posting one or two articles a week will result in a robust offering of informative articles about the benefits of doing business with you. Two blog posts a day for five years will yield a “website” with over 500 pages of content.

That’s 500 opportunities to share 500 different ways your product or service has been used to solve your target audiences problems.

So when is it time to stop business blogging? My answer would be when you’ve stopped offering new products and services and you’ve covered every possible angle on the products and services you currently offer.

Stop blogging for your business when you can’t think of another way to illustrate the value of your product.

Stop blogging for your business when every consumer in your target audience knows why your the natural choice.

Stop blogging for your business when you run out of ways to share with potential consumers the benefits of your product or service.

Of course, you won’t achieve any of the above in five blog posts or less. The act of blogging is easy – the art of packaging your products and services into a a cohesive marketing message is the hard part.

Of course, in order to stop blogging for your business you have to start – and for many business owners – they have yet to clear that hurdle.

Business Blogging – Free Blogs vs “Your” blog

October 26, 2010 by Kathy Hendershot-Hurd

One of the great things about having a business blog is it allows people who visit to ask questions via the comments section. Think of your business blog as an FAQ (frequently asked questions) page on steroids. Even if you have a “regular” website and even if that website has an FAQ page – a blog can still help you to illustrate all the potential benefits consumers can experience by using your products and/or services.

That’s just one reason business blogs are great for growing your business. They provide an opportunity for visitors to ask questions…. visitors who have found your business blog post while searching for information via the search engines. Recently, a visitor to this blog asked: “Is it better to have the blog on your own website or blog on another site that lets you post your blogs there for free?”

What a great question. It’s such a great -and basic- question that surely it’s one I’ve answered before.

OOPS!!!

Maybe not.

Is it possible that over the course of 314 blog posts that I haven’t answered this basic question about business blogging? A quick search through the posts and pages on this site reveals that I haven’t addressed this topic previously and it’s definitely one that needs to be addressed.

Why would you want to PAY for a business blog when you can blog so many places for free??

Well – as in most things online – FREE rarely is truly “free”. Often times – free comes with strings attached. The same is true of blogs.

While WordPress offers an incredibly easy, world famous 5 minute installation of the software – and if your hosting includes cpanel you can install WordPress without ever connecting via FTP – to truly set up your own self hosted WordPress business blog and use it as a powerful marketing tool requires a willingness to acquire a minimal level of technical expertise. Not only do you need to possess (or be willing to acquire) a smidgen of tech savvy to set up WordPress on your own – you need to make sure you keep your installation of WordPress up to date to protect your business blog from hackers.

There is an easier way – and that’s to simply set up your blog on one of the many free blog sites. Free blogs are by far the easiest way to get started blogging. They’re easy to use and easy to set up but because they’re free – but as anyone can tell you who has launched a blog – there’s a lot more to creating a success blog than simply creating a blog post or two. To unlock the full power of blogging for your business- you need a to craft a business blogging strategy in order to create a successful blog.

Let’s say you are able to invest the time and effort needed to educate yourself on your own on how to create a successful blog to promote your business. You might be thinking that it’s better to “learn the ropes” while blogging on a free site and then migrate your site to a self hosted blog – one which YOU control.

Which brings us to one of the key “sticking” points with free blogging sites. I liken it to building a house on land you do not own.

A while back, Yahoo decided to pull the plug on their free blogging site – much to the dismay of those who had come to depend upon the free blogging service. This illustrates a key point which is when it comes to free blogs – there’s no guarantee that any free blogging site will either continue to operate or continue to remain free. (A quick read of Tumblr’s terms of service agreement will reveal that they reserve the right to begin charging for the service at an unspecified point of time in the future).

With the more successful free blog sites, you can probably rest assured that they won’t pull the plug on your free blog site because they have developed a way to make money from your blog posts. You might be surprised to learn that many free blogging sites can use a plugin which inserts a special piece of code into each blog post. This bit of code will only display ads to visitors when they find your blog post via the search engines. You might not be aware of these ads because the plugin can be configured to not display ads to the author – or to visitors who arrive at the blog via other means like when they follow a link from your business website to the blog.

In other words, when you use one of these “freebie” blog sites – very often the visitors who find your post via the search engines will also be seeing paid ads in the body of the posts. Because of the nature of online advertising – those ads will most likely be run by you or your competitors.

It’s a brilliant easy money strategy for the free blog site owners because when someone finds your blog post via a search on a search engine – they are usually very serious about finding the products and services you offer – and very likely to click on these ads. If you’ve ever run a PPC campaign, you know that such ads can run as high as $20 or more per click. This is why these free blog services are willing to allow your quality blog posts live on their site for no charge, because you’re doing the work and they get paid from advertiser dollars instead of from you directly.

Still not convinced that starting your business blog under your own domain on your own web hosting account is the way to go?

Here’s the final item I’ll submit for your consideration – blogs obey the same “rules” that govern the web. One of the “rules” of the web is that older sites (and blogs) do better than newer sites (and blogs). The search engines LOVE blogs – especially older established blogs – blogs with loads of incoming links. Most of those incoming links – when you create a blog on a free hosting service – will be linking – for example – to yourblog.wordpress.com.

So when you decide to migrate your blog to your own domain name – you may be able to pull the database and migrate the blog posts – but you won’t be able to pull the incoming links with you. Those links STAY pointing to the free blog – you’ll have to earn new incoming links to your newly migrated blog just the same as if you started from scratch. I recommend that when a business blogger wants to migrate from a free blog to a self hosted blog that they leave the blog intact on the free site and simply start from scratch again – creating a text sidebar widget which directs visitors of the free blog to the new blog – where new information can be found.

Creating a successful business blog is a time consuming process that can yield great rewards for your business. Blogging for your business is truly a numbers game. Each week – you can create just two blog posts which results in over 100 pages of content written each year. As you create those blog posts, you’ll be unintentionally targeting “long tail keywords” – low volume keywords which people tend to use when they are REALLY searching online for information about the products and services you offer. As time goes on – those blog posts can more an more “authority” until most business blogs have literally dozens of blog posts – each bringing a trickle of prospective customers into the funnel. As those trickles combine – they grow into a stream and finally a mighty river. It doesn’t happen overnight – but it can and does happen.