Today I was looking in #MarketHive and could not help noticing that many new members were coming in and interacting social but not getting down to the job in hand of promoting their business by writing good content for their websites and social networks in the form of blog post. If you have a website it is vital that it is regularly updated and one of the easiest way is to include a blog or RSS stream of relevant information/

Many people have a fear of blogging not knowing what to write. If you are in business its a fear you need to overcome to successful market your business online. The general guidelines are to be able to write between 200-500 of interesting information connected with the business you are running. This is not a sales spiel, for example if one of your products is a couch mixture write a post about the reasons a cough can develop. Look online with Google search and you will find hundreds of entries start educating yourself on the subject, because you should know about what you are selling.

Your first blog is the most difficult and it is permissible to do a little copying and pasting from different articles so long as you are adding your own words to link them together. Try reading a long article and then precis and rewrite the article in your own words. The secret to success is to know your business and products inside out and make compelling posts that inform and keep people interested. Over time you will develop a style. I tend to put my name at the bottom of every post with a link to my business capture page and that it what does the business for me.

When you write a post to a blog in MarketHive it will also be posted into Facebook, Twitter, and Linked-In and I also use an Addthis add on in Firefox to post to addition sites such as Digg and groups in Facebook and Linked-In. Doing this quickly spreads the word.

Once you have a few posts under your belt, its time to increase your area of influence by using the Blogging assets such as BlogPress and BlogForum. You are best to place these on different websites, so you may need to to buy a few domains. Do some keyword research on your business and what you are writing about and try to buy a domain containing the relevant keyword. Its best if you also host the sites with different hosting companies so that they have different IP addresses.

There are also some blogging tools to use in MarketHive such as blog sharing and RSS Cocktail and when combines with the blogging assets can form the basis of a powerful SEO campaign.

BlogForum and BlogPress each require you to load one page onto your website and then every time you post to your blog they will automatically update the information on these sites. to ensure that each site contains different information you use the RSS cocktail tool to mix and match contents from your own blogs, friend and group blogs so that each is different, this provides both interesting reading for both human readers and more importantly search engines, plus lots of incoming links to your main business site.

David Ogden
MarketHive