Your blog is the most personal thing you will ever show the world. Present anyway you want, most of the people who see it will never see you. If your blog’s job is to promote you and generate revenue, then you are going to meet people. Via phone, email, or in person.
And, any way you look at it, if your blog is your paycheck, you want to present the very best, most professional image possible, as well as showing off the edge you have on the work you do (and that includes displaying some “edginess” in your presentation).
So, are you going to buy one of those canned websites that everyone else in your profession has? Google “mortgage broker”, or “real estate agent”; you’ll get a thousand iterations of the same brand because sales people know they have to have a web presence, but they don’t have the knowledge, or time to hone their skills, so they load their credit card information into a self-replicating web-site purchase engine, get their log-on and password and put in their contact details, and maybe their photo, and sit back and wait for the business to roll in.
Come on, do you really think that will work webmagic for you? I know it is easy and I also know it isn’t always cheap. But even if it was cheap and easy, would it be in anyone’s best interest? Probably Not. Making a splash on the internet, really creating buzz for your business, giving your pages GoogleJuice? For that you do need time, along with
- the knowledge of not only what you need but how to get it,
- some money, but
- probably not as much as you’d think to launch a blog and make it powerful enough to create webmagic,
- managed social networking for the best viral marketing campaign you can create.
And don’t forget,while you’re doing all that, you need to create fresh content for your blog readers, as their numbers grow.
So you need on the short list, Linked In, Facebook, Twitter. You need to start publishing those articles to e-zines, and you need to make sure you feed is available in at 57 variations for everyone out there because you never know what they’ll want. Well not 57, but sufficient choices. an RSS feed, an email option, do you want to also use Atom? Decisions, decisions, but hurry, cos those articles are still waiting . . . .
