As a business owner you may find it’s hard to sit down and write blog posts even though you know in your heart they’re needed. Blog posts have the ability to be in front of your market any time of the day or night and no matter where they are when they read it.

When you find you’re struggling to write posts or they’re taking you longer than the amount of time you have scheduled, you need to rethink how you make them happen. Here are a few suggestions to help you get through this difficult time.

The first thing you need to do is brainstorm for ideas. When you sit down to write you’ll have a better chance of writing something quickly and easily if you know what you’re going to cover the minute you go to write it.

The next thing that’s important is to avoid writing on topics you’re not familiar with. Research takes time and when you sit down to write a quick blog post, research is not how to do it.

Blog posts don’t need to be 400 or 500 words in length. Most times when people go to read blog posts, they have a short amount of time. This is why it’s better to keep your posts between 50 and 200 words. If you find you must write more, create a series of posts and link to them in each post.
continue reading "Tips for Making it Easier to Write Blog Posts"

Growing your business is a must when your only source of income is from your business. In order for this to happen, you must continually work your business. There are a number of ways to do this, but they need to be done on a regular basis.

1. Article Marketing

One of the most important things you need to do is article marketing. Writing articles and submitting them to article directories is what you need to do to make it happen. You can either do the writing yourself or you can hire a ghostwriter to make it happen. Your ghostwriter may be willing to submit the written articles to directories or you may need to hire a Virtual Assistant if you don’t have time to do it yourself.

Article marketing promotes your business through the bio you include at the end of your article. You’ll also be able to promote your business through the profile page you set up on the article directories. Most directories offer the profile so you’ll need to make sure it’s always current and that your links work.
continue reading "3 Must Use Tasks to Grow Your Business"

Your blog is one of the best ways to increase traffic to your site. When you post tips and suggestions that are geared to what you offer, your readers will come back for more. The ideal way to increase the traffic to your blog is to post daily. That can be a huge challenge when you have a family and run a business. There are several things you can do to make the posts easier for you.

Creating a blog calendar will help with the topics. Creating a calendar with topics for each day of the week will give you ideas for each day. You can use the ideas or you can write on whatever comes to mind. One way to always know what the topic is for a specific day is to come up with something that goes with the day of the week. For example, Wordless Wednesday is a great topic for your Wednesday post.

Now what I’ve done is created two topics for each day. That way I’m not doing the same type of post each day. Of course, it depends on the content for your blog as to what your categories will be. For Wednesday, mine are Wordless Wednesday’s and Writing Wednesday’s.
continue reading "2 Suggestions for Making Daily Blog Posts"

A lot of people think social media is the only thing they need to do to grow their business. Social media is an important tool needed to grow, but it’s not the only one that’s needed. One thing you do with social media is build trust with your market, but it’s not the only way you should do it.

Another way to build trust is to use article marketing. Article marketing gives you the ability to show others you’re an expert in your field through words. Having an article published online is no different than having it published on paper. People read them and feel an expert wrote it as long as it’s good quality and the information is correct.

One of the most important things to remember when it comes to article marketing is that your article won’t do you any good if you don’t submit it to article directories so others can read them. Allowing your articles to collect cyber dust is like throwing money down the drain. It’s just not good, but if you don’t have time to make the submissions, that’s what you may find, is happening with your articles.

Instead of allowing the cyber dust to collect, consider hiring a Virtual Assistant to take over and handle your article marketing tasks. When you do this, you’ll still have all the control, but you won’t have to worry about losing business because it’s not getting done.

Another daunting task that will lose you money is to not have your blog in front of your market. People will come and go in your market, but if you don’t have your blog out there for them to see, they’ll never know you exist and that you’re there to help them with their needs.

As hard as you may try, this is not something you can do on your own. This is why it’s important to submit your blog to the blog directories. When you do this you’ll have added exposure and the new people to your market will see it. This is another one of those tasks that many don’t do because it doesn’t directly make you money, but if you think about it for just a minute, you’ll see it does make you money. When you put your blog in front of your market they’re going to click through to see what you offer. If they’re interested they’ll go to your site, and it’s a chain reaction from there.

While your site is ultimately the winner when it comes to the traffic, without your market seeing your blog, they may never get to your site and if that happens, your site is not the winner. This is why it’s important to submit your blog to the blog directories. You only have to do this once as most of them require your RSS feed so it continually shows the most recent post.

This is another one of those tasks your Virtual Assistant can handle for you. She can go to all of the blog directories and submit your blog for you if she’s given the right information. The best thing to do is go to one or two sites to see what they’ll need and then create a document with this information. This will save her time and you’ll be able to have your blog on the directories quicker.

Your Virtual Assistant can help you with so many different things, but two of the most important tasks would be article marketing and blog directory submissions. These two tasks are very important in the growth of your business.

Corrie Petersen runs a successful Virtual Assistant business. She enjoys helping her clients reach their goals through the services she offers. If you’re ready to take your business to the next level, click here to see how she can help you make that happen.

While taking the summer off is what you may want to do, you certainly don’t want your business to do the same thing. If you do that you’ll find your income is zero and it’s hard to get it back up there again. So don’t let that happen. Instead, hire a Virtual Assistant to step in and run your business while you’re off playing and having a good time.

Your VA can send out your ezine, schedule your blog posts, submit articles you’ve written, and do social networking posts. All of which will help you keep your business in front of your customers and keep your business on the top end of the spectrum.

You’ll continue to make money all the while you’re sitting pool side having a great time with the family. Wouldn’t it be sweet to tell your family you were making money while you watched your kids play in the pool or while you were in the middle of nowhere camping? Well of course you would and your Virtual Assistant can make that happen for you.

When you use WordPress for your blog or site occasionally there are updates needed. You may also find you get tired of the theme you have or you may want to make a change in the lay out of your site. When either of these things happen, if you don’t know how to do it, you may find yourself stressed or leaving things the way they are simply because you don’t know how to do it. That’s not good and it’s not the way it has to be.

Updating your site helps to keep it safe and it prevents problems from happening. Hackers find new ways to do things and WordPress keeps up on those things and that’s part of what the updates do. Those also update sites with new features and changes that make things better.

Updating your site or changing the theme can be scary if you don’t know what you’re doing. If you do it wrong you could lose everything and that is not a good thing. If your host doesn’t back your site up properly you may lose changes that were recently made.

The best way to handle updates and theme changes is to hire a Virtual Assistant. Your VA will be able to keep up on the updates and make any type of changes you may need. This could possible include plugins, widgets, and the theme itself. She can also add information to your site and remove anything that’s out of date.

No matter what your needs are, a Virtual Assistant can help you make your site exactly what you want and need. Hiring a VA can help you save time and stress.

Your blog is one of the most important things you can have for your business. It gives you the ability to share things about your business with the world. It’s easier to reach people through your blog than it is a lot of other ways. Your blog also gives you the ability to brand yourself so others remember who you are.

It’s a good rule of thumb to post to your blog every day, but that can be hard when you’re running a business by yourself. So if you’re not able to make a post every day you should do it at least three times a week. You need to be consistent and do it on the same day every week. This will help people know when you’re going to make posts.

It’s also a good idea to set up an RSS feed and add a subscription option to your blog. When people have the ability to automatically receive notice that you’ve posted they’ll likely read it more often then they would if they had to remember, on their own, to go and look.

If you find all of those things are way over your head or you don’t have the time to write and schedule posts, it’s time to consider hiring a Virtual Assistant to help. Your VA can schedule your posts; help you with topics, and so much more.

So now is the time to stop stressing and start growing your business. Hire a VA today to help you make it happen.

Last week the blogging platform “Blogger” had some pretty major problems. To the point it was down for two days and then caused other problems after it was brought back up again.

While problems happen with any site online, it usually isn’t that bad when you have your blog hosted. Very rarely is your site down for days at a time. Most times is a few minutes or hours at the most.

With that said, if you’re with Blogger or another type of site and need a change, you should consider WordPress. You’ll have the ability to own a domain and purchase hosting so your blog is truly yours. You’ll have the ability to add themes that are perfect for your site, you’ll have a header all your own, and you’ll be able to submit it to the search engines. All of these things are offered through WordPress and the cost is minimal.

To help you with the transition from Blogger to WordPress, we offer three options for you to choose from.

1. For $99 you’ll receive one year of hosting, your own domain name paid for one year, and all of your posts transferred from your Blogger blog to WordPress. You’ll be able to have a theme that matches your needs, and plugins to help you make the most of your site.

2. For $49 you’ll receive your own domain name paid for one year and all of your posts transferred from your Blogger blog to WordPress. You’ll be able to have a theme that matches your needs, and plugins to help you make the most of your site.

3. For $39 you’ll have your blog set up for you. Your posts will be transferred from your Blogger blog to WordPress and you’ll be able to have a theme that matches your needs, and plugins to help you make the most of your site.

If you want to protect yourself from having your blog go down for several days you should really consider switching to a paid site using WordPress. While it’s NOT possible to prevent your blog from ever going down, you can have a great chance of it not happening as long or often when you choose this route.

We’re here to help you make the most of your blog and prevent downtime. Click on the Paypal button directly below the option you choose and we’ll get started right away.

I have discovered something about blogging and it has proved to be an outstanding thing for my business. I want to share that one tip with you today. You can do what you want with this tip, but I suggest you follow it if you want to grow your business in the way that I have in the past six months.

This one tip has grown my business by leaps and bounds and it’s wonderful. It’s exactly what I have wanted for several years. I wish it wouldn’t have taken me this long to figure it out, but it happens and that’s all there is to it.

There are two things that have really grown my business in the past couple of years. One of those things is Blogging. Blogging every day is the one thing that’s help me and I have discovered it stops when you stop blogging.

I have tried several things, but the one thing I have discovered that does not work when it comes to blogging is when you don’t use original content. If you use articles or other content that can be found on other sites, it’s not really something they want to read. The other part of the content that I’ve found doesn’t work would have to be articles. I posted two weeks worth of articles on my blog and the traffic went down. When I went back to posting new and fresh content the traffic increased again.

Now I don’t know exactly why this happened, what I can tell you is my opinion of the reason behind the content has to be the length of the content. A blog post needs to be easy to read and not very long. Most times when the content is long they will stop reading or they won’t even begin to read it. I have found it’s best to keep the posts around 200 to 300 words in length.

I plan to keep going with my posts using the lessons I’ve shared today. Once you know this type of information there is no reason not to use it to your advantage. I will continue to post my articles on my blog, but I will do it in conjunction with other posts so I’m able to make the most of my blog and grow my business like I have set out to do. I hope you’ll follow in my footsteps and make it happen.

Today is the start of the next Ultimate Blog Challenge and it’s going to be a good one. I’m really looking forward to this as I have learned so much from the ones I have done in the past.

One of the biggest things I discovered with the last challenge was the types of posts I was making. When I would strictly post articles my views were not as high as they were when I would do regular posts. Each time I would check the stats for an article and a blog post, the blog post would win almost every time.

So this time around I’m creating a calendar that is sure to guide me through this process and help me to make regular posts more often. I have started the calendar and hopefully by the end of the weekend it will be ready to go. This will help me to stay on track and ready to go with each day.

So here’s to a successful month. A month of goals being achieved, time spent with the family, and down time all wrapped in one. It is possible for all of these things to be achieved if you figure out what it will take and then make it happen.