4 Ways to improve your business blog

If you run a small business blog, chances are you’ve been experiencing a little trouble attracting traffic to your blog. This is due to the ever-growing competitive state of the web and especially the marketplace online. Don’t let this discourage you though. As an entrepreneur, this should be nothing more fuel for the competitive side of yourself.

It’s time to let that side of you shine.

Here are four things you can do to improve your business blog.

1. Publish a lot of content

It’s crucial that you publish content on your blog. If you don’t then you’re simply not up to par with your competitors, who are probably publishing daily. If possible, try to publish at least once a day … this helps position your blog as a reliable place for new content.

If you can, try to publish more than once a day, as the daily schedule has become the average. If you can out publish your competition daily, then you’re likely to gain the attention you deserve (assuming your content is up to par with theirs).

2. Use the language your readers use

This is also called keyword research, but when you put it this way it makes more sense. Using the language  that your readers use is an important aspect you shouldn’t take lightly, as it will likely affect your traffic directly. Use the language your readers use in order to create a direct connection with them. Not only will they assume you’re speaking their language, which you are, but they’ll be able to find your content in the search engines more efficiently, because it’ll pop off the screen from the rest of similar results.

3. Diversify your content

It’s important that you don’t become repetitive on your own blog. Mix it up a little with a variety of content … think about how magazines achieve this with guest writers and columns. There’s a sense of diversity as well as consistency. On that note, that brings us to …

4. Invite guest contributors

One of the best ways to expand your reach to more readers is to invite guest contributors to write for your blog. Two things happen here: first, the writer gets exposure as an authority in the niche for writing with your blog, and two, you get an overflow of traffic as they promote their guest post. In other words, you share traffic with each other, and hope a few readers stick around for more.

These tips will help you Improve your business blog

With just a little work in each of these areas, you’ll be able to improve your business blog on multiple levels … not only will attract more readers from the optimization of the language and guest contributors, but you’ll alsol be able to encourage them to stick around as your content becomes better and better.

If you’re not sure what to write about, there’s a simple solution everyone seems to overlook … read. Read a lot of similar content. This will help educate you about your niche, expand your views on topics to places you never thought you’d expand, and help you form your own views and knowledge, which are two things a blogger, regardless if for personal or business blogs, must have.

Here’s the Best Way to Make a Sitemap for Joomla! / VirtueMart

UBM Live sitemap (version 2)In searching for the best solution for generating an xml sitemap for Joomla!, our team had several parameters in mind.  The ideal solution had to:

  • Auto generate
  • Auto update
  • Keep the sitemap on the same URL, so that it could be resubmitted to Google Webmaster Tools with ease if needed
  • Be relatively user-friendly

So, we started initially with the handful of solutions we already knew about, from using them around the office on various projects:

  • Using http://xml-sitemaps.com
  • Xmap plugin for Joomla!
  • RedMystic plugin’s sitemap feature

XML-sitemaps.com offers a free version that is usually pretty effective…USUALLY.  The trouble with this is that first of all, the webmaster has to physically visit the website and generate the sitemap; the process cannot be easily automated.  For a one-time deal, this may do the trick.  But, what if your URLs change frequently, or your site uses SEF URLs which are rewritten on a semi-regular basis?  In addition, xml-sitemaps.com sometimes struggles with crawling through sites, and when it does, the result is a sitemap of only four or five URLs.  It wasn’t good enough in our books!

The Xmap plugin works, but it requires a bit of configuration.  First, the newest version doesn’t work with older versions of Joomla! (namely the ever-popular 1.5).  We recommend Xmap version 1.2.11 for Joomla! version 1.5.  Second, the XML sitemap feature doesn’t work unless you create a menu item with Xmap’s HTML sitemap FIRST.  The features of specific inclusion and exclusion are nice, and they work as promised, and the URLs for both the HTML and XML sitemaps are available within the Xmap control panel.

Finally, RedMystic came into play because we already have used it for Google Merchant Center data feed generation and auto-submission–we figured their sitemap generation and auto-submission wouldn’t be bad, either.  Like Xmap, it is necessary to do a bit of initial configuration for the XML sitemap to work, as the XML sitemap will not generate properly unless you create a menu item to the HTML sitemap FIRST.  Once that is done, the sitemap works very well, but the URL is a bit harder to find, which made it lose a few points in our book.  RedMystic’s sitemap generation feature is aimed at merely NOTIFYING the search engines of sitemaps, not submitting them to Webmaster Tools.  It is possible to do both.  To get you your RedMystic XML sitemap once it is generated, simply go to:  http://yourdomain.com//index.php?option=com_redmystic&view=sitemap&layout=raw&format=raw&sitemap=sitemap.xml.  Then, copy the only URL you see on that page, as THIS can be submitted to Webmaster Tools…an extra step that didn’t contribute to usability.  Also, the above-mentioned link is only available in RedMystic’s help files, making this particular feature NOT a great solution for those requiring something user-friendly.

In summary, Xmap won the battle.  While all three solutions worked to some degree or another, only Xmap offered the ease of use that we believe our users seek and deserve.  To download the Xmap sitemap plugin, please CLICK HERE

image credit: Rob Enslin

How to Use PHP to Easily Create a Unique ID

Want to autogenerate a unique ID for users on your site?  PHP lets you do this with the uniqid() function.

Fall 2011 Student Hackathon Coding
The uniqid() function has two parameters: the prefix and “more_entropy”.  The prefix is, as the name would suggest, something that will be appended to the first part of each ID.  The more_entropy parameter seems a bit more complicated but really isn’t–it has to do with whether you want 13 or 23 characters to be returned.

 

Syntax for the function:

uniqid(prefix, more_entropy);

Parameters:
  • prefix
    -Required
    -This is a string, and no quotes are needed.  Any number/alpha value is fine here
    -Example: uniqid(homebase); //this creates a unique ID that starts with “homebase”
  • more_entropy
    -Not required, but defaults to “false” (13 characters)
    -Boolean (true or false) value
    -Example: uniqid(homebase,true); //this creates a unique id of 23 characters that starts with “homebase”
Creative Commons License photo credit: hackNY

“Ask a question” Troubles – the Joomla!/VirtueMart vs GoDaddy Fight Continues

Another quirk brought to my attention lately with GoDaddy hosting is the feature for “Ask a question about this product” not working at all.  The “email sent” message shows up, but no real message is sent.  Why?  It has to do with GoDaddy’s weird set of email server settings, which I’m not going to go into right now.  What I DO care to expound upon is how to fix it:

First, inside the inner workings of your VirtueMart installation is a little class that handles what email your “Ask a question about this product” email gets sent FROM.  It tries to pick up the email from something you’ve set manually, but this makes GoDaddy mad.  Blank out this little line of code, and there is no longer any reason for it to be mad, so it works.

To blank out that line, find this file in your hosting account:
/administrator/components/com_virtuemart/classes/ps_main.php

Now, do a search within that file (“find”) this line:
$mail->Sender     = $from ? $from : $mosConfig_mailfrom;

Add a comment ( // ) in front of the line, so it looks like this:
//$mail->Sender     = $from ? $from : $mosConfig_mailfrom;

This has fixed the problem so far in all cases I have seen.

ID versus Class – What’s the CSS Difference?

The Manual amongst friends...

When you pick through the CSS code of a website, you will notice that the individual CSS sections (divs), tend to be associated with either ids or classes.  For example:

1)

<div id=”topmenu”>
//some code here
</div>

2)

<div class=”menutitles”>
//some code here
</div>

 In the first example, the div is associated with an id.  A div with an id can also be associated with a class, but we will get to that later.  The id selector is generally used to specify a CSS style for a unique element.  It

is common for a div to have a width, height, and position, as in the rare case that it IS duplicated on the page, its duplicate will need to have the same dimensions and formatting.  When you specify the styling for a div id in your CSS style sheet, you will use the # before the style rule:

(sample CSS style sheet)

#topmenu{
//some code here
}

A class can be used to specify the style for MULTIPLE sections of a website.  In the second example above, the div is given the class “menutitles”.  For the sake of this example, let’s assume that we are specifying styling for all menu titles on a certain page.  We might want them to all be the same color and font.  Even if those menu titles are in different sections of the page, we can specify that they are to follow formatting instructions for the cla

ss “menutitles”.  We can specify the formatting for a class in a style sheet by using the . before the style rule:

(sample CSS style sheet)

.menutitles{
//some code here
}

Effective use of CSS ids and classes will put you on your way to creating your own browser-compliant, visually appealing template.  

Creative Commons License photo credit: andré.luís