STEP 1: Think of a niche

You need to think of a niche that you are interested in, one that is as specific as possible, and one that has merchandise available on Amazon (you will see why later).

An example of a good niche is 70′s Detective Films. This is better than 70′s films, or detective films, because it is more precise.

STEP 2: Buy your URL

You should buy you URL from a site like names.co.uk or heartinternet.co.uk, which have a 1 click install for WordPress.

Expect to pay approx £10 for a .co.uk or £25 for a .com address for 2 years. You also need to buy hosting – normally the cheapest one will be fine as long as it works with the WordPress 1 click install.

Your URL should contain keywords relevant to your niche topic. It may be cooler to call it www.columbos-movies.com, but www.70sdetectivemovies.com will get more traffic.

STEP 3: Set up WordPress

The site where you buy your URL should make this really easy. Once you have installed WordPress go to Youtube.com and watch a few videos about how to use it – it’s very easy.

Install a wordpress template, then install some plugin. Essential ones are all-in-one-seo, analytics, sitemaps and any of the ones that lets people share your page on different social media.

Now you have your own website.

STEP 4: Add a shop to your site

The easiest way to do that is to join the Amazon affiliate program. To to this go to https://affiliate-program.amazon.co.uk/

Enter all your  details and set up an account. Follow the links to set up an astore.

In your a store you can select all the products that you want in your shop. You are better to have multiple shops with no more than 30 items in, than have 1 massive shop with lots of items. For example you could have one shop on the site that was ‘recommended 70′s detective films’ and another that was ‘books about 70′s detective films.

Once you have set up the shop you get a small bit of HTML code from amazon (don’t get scared by the HTML, it’s easy).

You need to add a page to your site called ‘DVDs’ – then add HTML code from the astore to the page and Bingo! you have a store on your site. You can change the product in the store at any time on Amazon and they will change automatically in the store on your site. You typically get 5% for every item you sell, and Amazon does all the work.

There are other affiliate programs, but this is the easiest to use (in my opinion).

STEP 5: Make your site google friendly

Find out more about how to do that here: http://flintcreative.wordpress.com/2009/06/23/5-tips-to-for-google-friendly-website/

To find out even more about how to do that read Get to the Top on Google: Tips and Techniques to Get Your Site to the Top of Google and Stay There

STEP 6: Start Blogging

Your blogs need to be keyword heavy – but you will know that, because you have read the link in step 5 – This one of the key things for getting people to your site. The more content that you have the more likely it is that you will show up in searches.

That is also why you should pick a topic that you are interested in, because you will want to write about it.

Your blogs can be very simple, i.e about a film you have just watched. Keeping with the 70′s detective films idea you could even write about a modern film you have just watched and how it is inspired by different detective films.

When you write about the films you should put product links, which you can get from the Amazon affiliate program. An example of this is the link to the David Viney book in step 5 – if you click on this and buy the book I will get a 5% commission – That is not why it’s there though, it’s the best book available on SEO.

Step 7: Get social

This step isn’t necessary, but could be good. For more info on how to use social media for your site red this article: http://flintcreative.wordpress.com/2009/08/24/229/

Step 8: Use google’s tools

Google has some amazing tools like webmaster and anayltics.

These both work with some of the plugins that you installed in step 3. For example you use the sitemap plug in with webmaster to submit your sitemap to google so that google know what pages to look at on your site.

You then use the analytics tool plugin to quickly set up analytics. Google analytics tells you how many people visit your sites, which pages they visit, how long they stay there for etc etc. It is invaluable. Some of the things that you write about will be more popular than others. This means that you should write more like that.

You should also sign up for adwords. Even if you aren’t placing ads with google you can use the keyword tool to find out what keywords are popular, then use them more in your blogs (there is a lot more about choosing your keywords in the David Viney book).

You can also look at AdSense, which is where you place google ads on your site. This is another way to make money, but in my opinion it’s not as key as the amazon affiliates.

The basic idea

An a6 (or slightly bigger) monthly magazine that fits into your back pocket (or handbag) and an e-reader/ ipad/ mobile phone app.

Instead of articles the magazine is made up of short stories written by modern youthful authors – the new Bret Easton Ellises or Irvine Welshes of the world.

Target market

Commuters, people who travel a lot, professional, working, intelligent people.

Why?

There are loads of people who love reading and would love to read more, but they are restricted. They don’t want to carry big books with them everywhere they go and they don’t have time to read and really get into stories.

Each of the stories in Read will be short so that they only last one or two journeys to and from work.

It is the antithesis of boring, disposable, picture-heavy, trash magazines – heat, OK, grazia etc.

Online

Read is an amazing opportunity to blend the online and offline worlds. Writers would go to the website to upload their stories, find out about competitions that Read was running, to find out the theme for the issue etc.

Authors could add an introduction to their stories on the site and everyone else could vote (based on the introduction) which stories should make it into print in that issue.

A community would also build around the magazine with people discussing (probably on the Read facebook group) which stories/ authors etc they like.

Portability

People would carry Read with them all the time- it’s small and if you do loose it it’s cheap to replace. Not like a huge novel that you’d hate to loose because you may have to buy it again just to read the last chapter.

Read would also be available to all people with e-readers (like the kindle) and as an app or iPads and mobile phones

Talkability

People always like to talk about what they are reading. With a great deal of people will be reading the same stories each month.The stories will be great topics of conversation.Readers will see others on the tube and Read stories will become topics of conversation – i.e. ‘Have you read the story on page 12… I never thought that xxxxxx would happen at the end’. The online discussions about the stories, their meanings, the authors would flourish, like it did with the TV series ‘Lost’

The writers

The world is full of writers and bloggers who would love to see their work in print. Writers would happily submit stories for very small fees, you wouldn’t have to pay more than £50/100 per story published… in fact most people would probably be happy to have their articles published for free.

Not having a staff of writers makes this a very cost effective proposition for a publisher.

Revenue

There are multiple revenue streams available:

1) advertising

2) publishers paying to have the first chapters of their books in print

3) sponsorship of writing competitions, where the winner gets published

4) product placement, where brand could pay for their products to be included in stories

5) sales of the magazine

6) subscription to the e-reader/ iPad/ phone app

If you would like to do something with this idea contact guy.blaskey@flintcreative.co.uk

Copyright Guy Blaskey / Flint Creative 2010

The Roundup ad made in 2009 by Flint Creative is now running again – look out for it!

This is not just a testament to how effective this ad has been, but to how effective the style of the ad, developed by Flint over a series of ads and sponsorship idents, has been.

Flint’s TV work for Roundup has made it the UK’s Best Selling Weedkiller  - and increased sales by over 30%

The work has included the 2008 comparative ad, sponsorship idents for UK TV Style Gardens and other TV and press advertising.

The work has been awarded the IPA effectiveness award and is a great example of how to use TV advertising, in the modern marketing mix. Instead of the blanket mass-broadcast approach, most of the Roundup budget goes on ‘Narrowcasting’ – showing the ad only on key TV stations, to the key audience (gardeners) at key points in the year (bank holiday/ gardening weekends). This has allowed Roundup to punch above it’s weight and combined with the memorable, hard-hitting style of the ads, ensures that Roundup gets extremely high ad re-call.

How Flint Creative helped Blue Chip Feed increase sales, reduce costs, increase communication with customers, get PR coverage and a whole lot more.

Background:

Blue Chip is the market leading equine supplement brand in the UK. Research by Flint Creative showed that many people who didn’t use one of Blue Chip’s products didn’t do so because they thought it was expensive. However many people who did use it commented that although it was one of the higher priced in the market it was also the best value, as it worked better than any competing products.

Blue Chip’s historic advertising had focussed on professional riders who used the products. Although Blue Chip never pays anyone to endorse the products and all the professionals use the products because they want to the research showed that people assumed that the professionals were being paid for their endorsements, and this affected the credibility if the endorsements. Also, each ad had previously only featured only 1 of the products in the Blue Chip range. Although this was necessary so as to not confuse the ads it also meant a low media spend per product.

The aims:

Increase sales

Increase numbers of new customers

Reduce advertising costs

Create a campaign that got retailers promoting the products and had PR potential

Drive trial of the different products in the range: Both getting existing customers to try new products and getting new customers

Increase communication with customers, especially feedback on the products

Develop the Blue Chip database

Develop interesting content for social media; blog, facebook and twitter

Methodology:

We developed “The Blue Chip Challenge”.

This had a variety of facets:

To entice people to buy we offered a £5 voucher and a 40-day money back guarantee.

A money-off voucher is a very simple marketing technique, in this case people had to visit a specially created microsite where they gave the details about themselves and their horses in exchange for the money-off voucher. This enabled us to build a database of customers and the specific problems they had with their horses, allowing Blue Chip to offer tailored advice where necessary, it also gave us an opportunity to find out what media people were consuming and what other products they were using. More importantly it gave us an opportunity to find out where people had found out about The Blue Chip Challenge – This information let us know which of the publications that we advertise in work and which don’t – allowing us to cull those that don’t get results and save money on media.

The money back guarantee was a mark of Blue Chip’s confidence in their products. The Blue Chip challenge ran in tough economic times. The money back guarantee took the risk out of the purchase for the customer.

Feedback

When people registered on The Blue Chip Challenge (which they had to do in order to download the £5 voucher and activate the money-back guarantee) they also downloaded a Feed Diary. Feed diaries were also made available in tack and feed stores nationwide, which gave stockist something to talk to their customers about and gave the (3rd party) sales force something to talk to the stockists about.

The Feed Diary allowed customers to monitor the progress in their horse over 40 days both with daily comments and daily scores from 1-10 for different benefits of the products. This increased the amount of feedback that we got form customers and the daily scoring allowed us to get across the benefits of the products extremely clearly.

Customers were offered incentives to let us know how they were getting on with The Blue Chip Challenge. These included money off your next order, merchandise and entry into a prize draw to win a year’s supply of the Blue Chip Product that you trailed.

Feedback from customers was key, as the research that we ran showed that although people didn’t necessarily trust the feedback from a professional who they (wrongly) assumed was being paid for the endorsement, they did trust feedback from other riders like themselves.

Ongoing communication

As Feed Diaries came in they were posted on the Blue Chip blog. This blog was hosted on the microsite bluechipchallenge.com and also automatically fed into the main Blue Chip site bluechipfeed.com and into the Blue Chip facebook page facebook.com/bluechipfeed.

Each new Feed Diary was also posted in Twitter.

Some of the Feed Diaries were so spectacular, with incredible before and after pictures, that they generated a lot of PR coverage in the press. The press coverage, online coverage and general ongoing communication not only promoted the products, it also promoted The Blue Chip Challenge itself – getting more people to sign up to the challenge, generating more feedback, more contact etc – Developing a viral cycle.

The most important thing about the ongoing communication was that it was 2-way communication. Customers were communicating with the company, as well as the company communicating with the customers. This kind of interaction is key to modern marketing and allows customers to feel more engaged with the brand, which makes them more loyal.

Stage 2

We ran an online survey of all the people signed up for The Blue Chip Challenge. This gave us some amazing feedback.

One of the standout facts was that “95% of customers reported an improvement in their horse”

We used this as the basis of the 2nd stage ad, along with quotes from people who had taken The Blue Chip Challenge.

This ad demonstrated the efficacy of the products, showed that they were used by ‘real people’ as well as professionals and was a very simple, singular message that promoted all of the product in the range.

Results:

60+ Feed diaries/ testimonials received

95% of customers reported an improvement in their horse

98% of customers would recommend Blue Chip to a friend

93% of customers would continue to use the product that they trialed

Dramatic reduction in media spend, whilst increasing sales

Thousands of people singing up to The Blue Chip Challenge: 50% had never tried a Blue Chip Product

800+ Facebook fans (who still get regular updates including the having the Blue Chip Blog automatically appear in their home page)

600+ Followers on Twitter (who still get regular updates)

Increased sales online AND in store

PR coverage at launch stage, mid-way results stage and final winner stage

1) Buy your URL

Buy your URL at www.names.co.uk

This should be www.yourbusinessname.com (see http://flintcreative.wordpress.com/2010/01/15/businessnaming/ for direction on choosing your business name).

2) Set up a webmail account

If you don’t have a webmail account any webmail account is OK, but we recommend Google Mail mail.google.com – make sure you choose a sensible name, such as yourname@gmail.com

3) Set up a wordpress site

Go to www.wordpress.com

Create an account, then create a blog. Choose the URL  yourbusinessname.wordpress.com

Then use the wordpress dashboard to add pages to your site, chose widgets (the bits at the side), chose a theme for the site etc

This is the simple/free version of WordPress that doesn’t require hosting etc. There is a more advanced/ hosted version that is more complicated to set up, but the wordpress.com version is a great starting point and very quick.

You will need to play about with WordPress to get the hang of it, but it is very easy and flexible.

4) Redirect to your URL

Login to names.co.uk

click on ‘control panel’

click on ‘domain names’

select your domain, click on ‘www.yourbusinessname.com’

click on ‘Email & Web forwarding’ (on the left under ‘Domain Names’)

And you will get a screen like the one below:

In the ‘URL to forward to’ box put your new WordPress URL:  yourbusinessname.wordpress.com

In the ‘Email forwarding’ put your name in the ‘alias’ section and you gmail address ‘yourname@gmail.com’ in the ‘email address to forward to’ box and in the ‘catch-all addresses’ box.

Then click update.

Now when someone goes to www.yourbusinessname.com they will go through to your website and when then email yourname@yourbusinessname.com the email will go to your gmail account.

5) Set your email to send from yourname@yourbusinessname.com

Log in to your gmail account.

click ‘settings’ in the top right

click on the ‘accounts and import’ tab

Under ‘send mail as’ click ‘send mail from another address’

In the pop up window put yourname@yourbusinessname.com and follow the instructions.

I would change the settings to make the yourname@yourbusinessname.com your default email, and tick the box ‘Always reply from the same address to which the email was sent’.

Thats’s it. You are now ready to go… all you need now is some business cards with your email and website on – and Flint can design those for you.

And you can start driving traffic to your site with google Adwords, but that is too much to cover in this post.

This is just an idea – but we think it’s a good one.

What is it? It is called the ClothesChair™. Mainly aimed at bachelors, who possibly come home late, wearing a suit. At the moment many of these people will place/ throw their jacket over the back of a standard chair and trousers can get thrown wherever. This is not good for the lifetime of the suit, or the way it will look the next day.

Features: The back of the chair perfectly fits a suit jacket, in the same way as coat hanger would. Both arms are both perfect to hang trousers over and the s-bend even allows you to hang other clothes, such as shirts and socks. The s-bend in the arms also acts as a king of ‘suspension system’ for the chair – allowing you to rock backwards and forwards, when you are using the ClothesChair™ for its other purpose – sitting.

Product materials: The sketch above is clearly very rough – we see the pencil-shaded area being made from heavy duty leather ad the biro-lines being made of chrome-coated strengthened-steel.

If you like this idea, let us know. And if you know anyone who’d be interested in producing it tell them to get in touch.

copyright flint creative 2010

The recession, and the aftermath of a recession, is boom time for new businesses. Whether it’s people who have been made redundant setting up on their own, people who have spotted a gap in a changing market or just people who fancy a change tougher economic times can be a great benefit; rent/ machinery/ staff costs are all cheaper and there is often less competition.

If you are staring a company you need a good name. Up to about 5 years ago choosing a name was either down to expensive research, or just plain guess work. The internet however has leveled the playing field. Most businesses want to be found in google… but what will people be searching for to find you? To answer this out you need the first thing you need to do is to work out if you are a commodity or a brand.

A commodity…

…is something that people don’t really care who they buy from – essentially you get the same product no matter who you get it from. You may buy a commodity from a branded company, but the brand is not the main reason for your decision. A great example of this is car insurance: YES people do buy from brands, such as Direct Line or Churchill, but they do not buy for the brand – they buy (principally) from the cheapest supplier. If you are setting up in a commodity market like this and don’t have the money to compete with the big brands then you should find a niche within that market and name yourself after that niche – that will both help you get found in google and appear more relevant to your potential customers – a great example of this is The Student Motor Quote Company www.thestudentmotorquotecompany.co.uk – They currently have  no.1 and no.2 natural search results in google for “student motor insurance”. It may not be glamorous, but they will get a slice of the insurance pie… if they were just another car insurance brand without the marketing clout of Direct Line, Churchill etc they would get nothing

Tip: To work out what keywords are best to name your company after use the google adwords keyword tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordTool) to look up how many average monthly searches the keywords get. You then need to compare this with the number of search results you get when you type the keywords into google (see image below, the search gets 1,290,000 results).

You do not want to chose a name that just gets a lot of searches, you need one that also has less competition, for example

‘student motor insurance’ may get 100,000 searches/ month and have 1m competing pages

‘student car insurance’ may get 300,000 searches/ month – you might think this is better as there are 3x as many searches, however if there are 10m competing pages you have more than 3x less chance of making it to the top, ‘student motor insurance’ is a better choice.

A brand…

…is something entirely different and needs building away from the world of internet search, through advertising, word of mouth or myriad other ways. In order to make your brand findable in google you need to have a unique name – The idea is that people find out about that name, then google it and you are at the top. There are different ways of doing this, such as making up words, like Skype, Ebay, Rolex, Starbucks or even google! Another way is to combine or adapt existing, relevant words in a unique combination, such (as a brand we created) Pooch & Mutt, Nespresso, Timberland, Gieves and Hawkes etc. The important thing to remember here is that to be found people need to know about the brand, no one would search Timberland unless they already knew they made footwear.

Pitfall to avoid: You may come up with a name that is unique in your industry, so you think it will stand out online. This may not be the case. ‘Eskimo Shoes’ may sound like a cool name for a shoe shop, or shoe brand focusing on shoes for cold weather, but you are going to be in competition (in terms of competing to get to the of of google) with sites about what shoes Eskimos wear.

There is a lot, as marketeers that we can learn from this.

It is a very modern, 360 degree campaign including:

• A (very press worthy) atheist summer camp for kids (more at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/5674934/Richard-Dawkins-launches-childrens-summer-camp-for-atheists.html)

• A high profile (and very press worthy – this picture was from the Daily Mail) bus advertising campaign letting the public know that there porbably is no God, so they should stop worrying and enjoy life
  
• Facebook groups with over 4,000 followers
• A youtube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/richarddawkinsdotnet
• TV Shows, such as channel 4′s ‘Faith & Belief’
• Talks on ted.com
• Twitter https://twitter.com/richarddawkins with over 17,ooo followers

And a whole lot more.

This campaign has had a lot of success and from a marketing perspective it is not hard to see why; a true cross-media campaign with a consistent message – “God does not exist. Science (and evolution) is proven, so you stop stop believing in God and put your faith in science” – and things that get people and the press talking.

The cynical amongst you may think that this is even cleverer than a good campaign to market atheism, and is in fact an amazing campaign to sell books, but for the sake of this I am going to take Richard Dawkin’s at his word in the ted.com talk – that he wants to promote ‘Militant Atheism’.

Taking the promotion of ‘Militant Atheism’ as the campaign goal I would like to point out where I think that Richard Dawkins could do better. The reason for this is not any desire to promote atheism, it just shows a very good example of how, in-spite of great media campaign the creative message can be improved to get better results.

There are 2 things that Richard Dawkins is doing wrong from a marketing perspective:

1)  Telling people that they are wrong

2)  Talking about the product, not the benefits

1. Telling people they are wrong

No one likes to be told that they are wrong and it is a bad way to convince anyone of anything. Taking the atheism example, people believe in God, most of them always have and you telling them they are wrong and proving they are wrong is not going to convince them because they will always have an answer for it, usually along the lines of ‘you can’t prove God doesn’t exist’ – which is a ridiculous argument, but people will stick by it.

So what should you do?  The best thing to do is to tell people that they are right to believe in God.

That may sound counter-intuitive, but telling someone that they are right to believe in God is not the same thing as telling someone that God exists. The next step is to prove from a scientific perspective why they believe in God. There are evolutionary benefits to believing in God; people who share a belief can be more easily controlled and led – This can lead to many evolutionary advantages, such as fighting together, building together etc. Therefore people who are genetically predisposed to believing in God would be more likely to survive and pass on the ‘believing gene’ to others.

Similarly many people believe that God helped them through an event/ recovery from an injury etc. These people have managed to use their belief to dig deeper within themselves. You cannot tell these people that there is no God, because they have proof (their recovery). To convince these people the best way would be to do some research into “The God Placebo effect” and explain to them that it was their belief that helped them, not the existence of what they believe in

If I were Richard Dawkins I would make the next step of my campaign “The Evolution of God” and say to people ‘You are right to believe in God, but let me explain to you why you do believe in God’ by explaining to people that their belief in God is an evolutionary trait to ensure survival you are helping them to understand that there is a difference between believing in something and it existing and you can explain how evolution does work, you nudge them in the right direction and then they can make up their minds with the facts presented in a “you’re right” not a “you’re wrong” way.

HOW DOES THIS RELATE TO MARKETING MY PRODUCT?

Here is a very simple example:

You are launching a new brand of health supplement “Product Q” there is already a market leader in the category “Product B”.

What you want to do it tell everyone “You are wrong for buying Product B, you should buy our Product Q instead. It’s better”, but this is not very believable, because you can be sure that the makers of Product B will say that that is better and you are giving consumers no reason to believe you over them.

Instead you could say “Product B is a really good product, we know it must be good because it has some of the same active ingredients as our product, Product Q. However our product also has other ingredients such as xxx, xxx and xxx, that offer the following benefits….”

This way you are not telling customers that they are wrong to buy Product B, you in fact are telling them they were right to buy it, but by educating them you get them to realise that they would be ‘more right’ to buy Product Q, your product.

(I do appreciate the slight irony that this article is about what the Athesist marketeers are doing wrong, but I am not necessarily trying to convince them to do anything)

2. Talking about the products, not the benefits

Also known as ‘selling the steak, not the sizzle’.

This is where a lot of people go wrong. It is not important to tell people about your product, it is important to tell people about what your product can do for them.

In the ‘Marketing Atheism’ example we are being told that God does not exist and science hold the keys to understanding our world. This is a great claim, but is nothing compared to the benefits that are being offered by the competition (organised religion); being part of a community, curing disease, life after death, absolution from sins, 24 virgins in heaven (this one is the product, the benefits are for you to imagine), caring, happiness!!

So what does atheism need to do to get someone to chose Science over Religion? Simply it needs to offer benefits. Let’s say you are selling atheism to a teenager, he already understands a bit about religion and has known about it all his life. He also knows a bit (hopefully) about science through schooling. You can say that he is at an imaginary cross roads, where he could choose to learn more about science. You tell him that ‘science holds the keys to understanding our world’ – he doesn’t care. Instead you could tell him that by understanding science he could invent the next ipod and make a fortune, or develop a medicine and save millions of lives, or develop an alternative power source and save the planet whist making a fortune. Now science is competing in benefits with happiness and life after death.

HOW DOES THIS RELATE TO MARKETING MY PRODUCT?

When you know a lot about your product it is very tempting to tell people why it is so good… but they don’t care, they care about what it is good for them.

Taking the health supplements example once again. It is very easy to tell people about all the active ingredients that your product has and this will even work to some people who know about these active ingredients. But for those (the majority) that don’t know about these ingredients they need to know what your product does for them. For example if your supplement thickens hair, you could mention the ingredients and hope people know about them, better than that you could tell them the product makes their hair ticker, even better than that you could show a down-in-the-dumps person loosing their hair, then the same person with think hair looking happy – so you go from selling ingredients to selling happiness, and everyone wants happiness!!

I hope you have enjoyed this article as a very roundabout way of explaining 2 very common errors that you can see in marketing campaigns… and if you do know anyone involved in the ‘marketing’ of religion or atheism, please pass on to them.

The 10 tips below are all free and all things that you should be doing to make social media marketing easy.

However, these only tell you how to communicate, not what to communicate – these tips will help, but what you say is most important.

1. Create a Facebook page for your business/ brand

As you seen on the screenshot crop below you can create a Facebook page for a ‘celebrity, band or business’. If you are looking to promote a brand using social media you should do this.

This feature was added to Facebook a while after it launched, so many businesses have simply set up Facebook profiles as though their brand was a person. Whilst this is not a bad thing to do there are a lot of benefits of creating the page as a celebrity/band/business page, which I will go into later.

2. Create a vanity URL for your Facebook group

This feature was added in around July 2009. Having a vanity URL means that instead of having a long URL for your facebook page full of random numbers such as (  http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/poochandmutt?ref=ts )and letter you have a short URL such as ( http://www.facebook.com/poochandmutt ) , which you can email to people, have in your email signature etc.

To set your vanity URL go to http://www.facebook.com/username/

3. Create a blog

There are very simple blogging sites out there such as www.blogger.com (owned by google) and www.wordpress.com

In my opinion blooger.com is better if you want a pure and simple blog, such as the Pooch & Mutt Blog ( http://poochandmutt.blogspot.com/ ) and wordpress.com is better if you want more detail about your company/products/promotion such as ( http://www.bluechipchallenge.co.uk ) and the blog you are reading now.

The benefits of having a blog external to your site is that when you link to your main site to it the links will count as ‘external links’, which will benefit your google rankings. I also assume that creating a blog in blogger.com means that google is more likely to index it quicker, as google owns blogger.com – however this is only an assumptio.

The benefit of having a blog on your own site is that you aree creating more content on your site, giving more people more resons to visit your site.

What to write in your blog is an entirely different subject, but a couple of simple rules are

• 1) Do not just sell sell sell
• 2) Write something that your customers will be interested in and that will help them
• 3) Write something that you thin people will forward to others
• 4) Use your keywords and link them to relevant sections of your main website (if relevant)

4. Create a blog feed

Set up an account with feedburner (www.feedburner.com) – also owned by google. This enables you to do a few things:

• a) Get your blog delivered directly to people’s email for FREE

The below screenshot is taken from www.poochandmutt.com – as you see there is a box on the right of the page where customers can enter their email addresses.

Feedburner provides you with the code to do this in its ‘Publicize’ section – it is very easy to set up

• b) Feed you blog into your site

If you have your blog hosted on a separate site you can use a feedburner feed to have a copy of it on your main site.

For example the Blue Chip feed blog is at www.bluechipchallenge.com (hosted by wordpress.com). However you can read the blog at http://www.bluechipfeed.com/blog.html – Feedburner gives you the code to set this up – all you need to do is put it in your site

• C) Get stats

In Feedburner’s ‘analyze’ section you can see how many people are reading and interacting with your blog – It won’t be many at first, but it will grow!

Feedburner has a load of other great features, but these are in my opinion the most important when starting.

5. Add a Facebook Fan Box to your blog

You can add a simple button to your blog (and to your main website) that peopl can click on to become a Facebook fan, as shown below.

To find out how to do this go to http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Fan_Box

6. Import your blog into your Facebook

The simplest way to ensure that you Facebook page has fresh content is to set it to import directly from your blog (assuming you write your blog regularly -if you are not it gives you a good reason to do so).

It is very easy to set your blog so that it automatically publishes within the notes section of your Facebook page – to find out how to do this click here: http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/02/22/how-to-import-your-blog-into-facebook/

7. Create a Twitter account

Go to twitter.com and set up an account – it is very easy

Although you may not know what to tweet about at first you will learn as you read other people’s tweets.

Twitter is also a very good way to not only what you and your company is doing, what shows you are going to etc, but also what you are putting on your blog, website, facebook etc – driving people to those pages… and you can also set Facebook to automatically tweet to your Twitter account (see below)

8. Create a Hootsuite account

This is not essential, but is very useful.

If you set up a Hootsuite account and Tweet using its URL shortening feature then you can see how many clicks your tweets are getting – which is very useful to know.

9. Add your Twitter updates to your Site/ Blog

Just go to http://twitter.com/badges and follow the very simple instructions.

This can automtcally generate a widget for a blogger blog, as you can see below.

If you click on the other option you can get code for both flash and html widgets – for a beginner I would recommend the html, as less can go wrong

10. Get your Facebook page to Tweet

This is a very new piece of functionality, developed in the last month by an intern at Facebook.

Simply go to http://www.facebook.com/twitter/ and set Facebook to link to twitter – there are options of what you want to tweet, I would recommend that you choose all of them

There you have it.

Now everything is linked, so when you write a blog it will:

• Emailed to your email subscribers
• Published on your website
• Published on Facebook
• Tweeted as new content by Facebook
• The tweet will feature on your site and blog

All you have to do is think about what your customers want to read and what to say on your blog

P.S. Don’t forget to change your email signature to include all your social media, i.e.:

Website: www.poochandmutt.com
Blog: www.poochandmutt.blogspot.com
Twitter: twitter.com/poochandmutt
Facebook: facebook.com/poochandmutt