If you blog for business (or otherwise), there is a great way to connect with your blog’s readers by adding the Google Friend Connect gadget to your blog. It’s a tool that enables your followers to keep up with your blog, and to connect with the blogs and websites of all your other followers. You can also customize it to match your blog, and it is very easy to use.

We use the Google Friend Connect gadget here at OBJ. You can see it on the right side of the blog. If you click on any photo icon you see in our Followers list, a window will open that shows you a brief profile of the follower, along with the other blogs they follow, and their own website information (if applicable).  You can click on any of those links to visit those blogs and/or websites. You can add followers as friends, and you can also send them a message, if you like.

Google Friend Connect is a wonderful marketing and social networking tool. I highly recommend it! If you’d like more info, just follow the link below.

Google Friend Connect

There are a lot of people selling from their blogs these days, either as an additional way to generate sales, or as a means to replace web hosting that they may no longer be able to afford in our struggling economy.

If you are interested in selling from your blog, please check out my article in the latest issue of Creative Times Magazine. I offer information and advice on how to do just that within the article. Click the link below to be taken to the magazine’s download page.

Selling From Your Blog Article at Creative Times Magazine

A lot of people are blogging these days for business. They might be using their blog as a means of establishing a web presence, and it’s a great free way to do that. Or they may be using their blog as a marketing tool, advertising sales, specials, new products and services and the like. Many people also sell products or services directly from their blogs too. So blogging can be an important and beneficial tool for almost any business.

No matter what your business-related reason for blogging, good SEO is essential for your blog, just as it is for any other website. And one thing you can do to help improve your blog’s SEO is to add meta tags to the Template. If you aren’t sure how to do that, here are some simple directions for doing so.

NOTE: The content editor in this WordPress site tends to alter things in HTML code and they don’t display correctly on the page. This generally affects apostrophes and quotation marks. When you copy the code below, please retype the apostrophes and quotation marks yourself, before pasting the code in your Blogger template. Otherwise, it may not work. And be sure to work in a plain text document, rather than a word processor like Word or Works, etc. Those programs also tend to reformat HTML code.

1. Login to your account at Blogger.
2. Click on Layout, and then click on Edit HTML.
3. Search for the following bit of code, which will likely be near the top of the template.

<b:include data=’blog’ name=’all-head-content’/>

4.  Directly underneath that bit of code, paste the following code:

<meta content=’PUT DESCRIPTION HERE’ name=”description”/>
<meta content=’PUT KEYWORDS HERE’ name=”keywords”/>
<meta content=’PUT AUTHOR NAME HERE’ name=”author”/>

Be sure to replace the content for your Description, Keywords, and Author Name, where indicated. And don’t forget to save  your changes.

I’ve just posted two new pages to Online Business Junction. One page has resources for a variety of Etsy Tools.  The other is a page about Favicons, providing resources for online favicon generators, along with instructions on how to add a favicon to your website, and to your Blogger blog. Check them out when you have a chance.

Many people with an online business also maintain mailing lists to send out newsletters. Frequently, people also pay to have a mailing list service each month, such as Constant Contact, Mail Chimp, etc. But did you know that if you also have a blog at a host like Blogger or WordPress, you can use your blog as your newsletter? Not only would this save you lots of time, but it would also save you money, if you pay for a separate mailing list service. To use your blog as your newsletter, all you need to do is have your blog’s feed burned at a feed-burning site like I use: Feedburner.

Your blog usually has an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed, which is really just a way of delivering web content that is frequently changing. It allows anyone to get changing web content, such as from blogs, without the need to visit the website that the content appears on. To do this, the feed gets “burned,” and that enables people to subscribe to the feed, either in a feed reader or via email. So once your feed gets burned, anyone can subscribe to it in a feed reader (I use the Google Reader myself). Better yet, you can get HTML code from your feed account that you can place on your website, enabling people to subscribe to your blog via email.

I love this feature of my blog feeds, and I use it with all my websites so that I can use my blog as my newsletters. It eliminates the need for a mailing list service. It saves you tons of time, because all you have to do is post on your blog and anyone who has an email subscription will get the post automatically by email. If they subscribe in a reader, they can read it along with any other feeds they have subscribed to there. Or, they can visit your blog at any time too, if they like. And if by some chance you’re doing the big no-no and sending out newsletters as a mass email from your own inbox, you can stop wasting the time doing that, and help prevent yourself from getting blacklisted by ISP’s for sending out spam (which, is what happens quite frequently when you are sending out mass emails from your own email account)!

So really, there are lots of great reasons to use your blog as your newsletter. After all, who doesn’t like to save time and, in today’s economy, money? BTW, have you subscribed to the blog you’re reading right now? If not, follow the link on the right side of the blog (under the SUBSCRIBE header) and subscribe today!

Blogger Buster is a great site for getting tools, themes, widgets and much more for your Blogger blog.

Reflection Maker lets you upload a photo and create a reflection effect photo as a result. This might be very handy for those of you wanting to add an occasional special effect to a photo on your website or blog.

Hope you find these links useful! If you know of some others, please feel free to drop me a line at tina at primitivebusinessjunction.com so I can share them with our blog readers!

Widgepedia

Widget Box

On a business blog, I think there IS such a thing as too many widgets; they can become distracting and too many are just unnecessary. But there’s no harm at all in adding a personal touch to your biz blog with a couple of cool widgets. So have fun with them….just don’t get too carried away. But hey, on your personal blog, go crazy!

There are other sites like that one out there on the Web. If you find some others you like, post a comment with the link!

The best thing you can if you’re trying to do SEO yourself and you aren’t very “techie” is to read and learn as much as you can about it. If you’re trying to build and grow your website, this is just a must to help you reach your goals of success. I have lots of information about SEO on Primitive Business Junction. And I have posted many links there to other sites that offer even more info, for all skill levels, to help people understand SEO. You really owe it to yourself and your website to learn as much as you can, so that’s really the best advice I can give on this topic.

As for WordPress vs. Blogger, I’d say that’s really a matter of personal choice. If you’re comfortable with Blogger, there is no need to switch. I use Blogger for 3 of my blogs. But I am building a new online marketplace on a WordPress integrated site, and I must say that Blogger is much more user-friendly. I like WordPress and its features, but I don’t think I’ll be switching my Blogger blogs over any time soon. But with regard to the indexing of blog pages by the search engines (Blogger vs. WordPress), I don’t think there’s an easy way to compare crawl rates on one vs. the other. All of the SE’s are going to crawl sites most efficiently that have been appropriately optimized, that are updated frequently, regularly pinged (in the case of blogs), that have a good internal link structure, sitemaps and robots.txt files, and that have good server speeds. Any website or blog that meets these criteria has the best chance of getting crawled and indexed in the most timely and efficient manner.

Yahoo Widgets

Google Widgets

Widget Box

If you add any to your blogs, just use them on a limited basis. You don’t want your blog, especially if it’s tied to your business, filled up with widgets!